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Adapting for Rootless

What is rootless?

  • "rootless" is the term used for jailbreaks which do not have access to the root filesystem. This means that anything outside of /var/ and /private/preboot/ is not writable. However, the root user is still accessibly on a rootless jailbreak.

How does this affect my tweak?

  • Existing tweaks which do not support rootless will need some changes in order to work on a rootless jailbreak. For instance, preference bundles are stored in /Library/PreferenceBundles/ on a traditional ("rootful") jailbreak. However, since a rootless jailbreak does not have the ability to write to outside of the aforementioned directories, there needs to be a change made to the path in order to work properly. On rootless jailbreaks, the jailbreak files are stored in /var/jb/. Thus, the path becomes /var/jb/Library/PreferenceBundles/. This is the main difference between "rootless" and "rootful" jailbreaks.

How can I adapt my tweak for rootless?

Firsrly, it is best to always use the most up-to-date version of Theos. Make sure to update it if you installed Theos a while ago.

Theos includes convenient macros for you to use in order to adapt for rootless. They are stored in a header file called rootless.h which is bundled in recent versions. Say we have a file path that needs to be adapted stored within an NSString like so:

NSString *filePath = @"/Library/Application Support/";

This particular directory does exist in non-jailbroken iOS. On "rootful" jailbreaks, tweaks can write to this directory to store files. However, on "rootless" jailbreaks, there is no ability to do that. So, rootless jailbreaks write to /var/jb/Library/Application Support/. So how can we include the /var/jb/ part of the path when compiling for "rootless" but not "rootful?" Well, the macros make that process quite simple. In order to utilize the macros, you need to #import <rootless.h> at in your file. That will give you the ability to access the macros. Then, you can just wrap the path in the ROOT_PATH_NS() macro in order to adapt for "rootless" jailbreaks. So, it can be done as easily as this:

#import <rootless.h>

// ...

NSString *filePath = ROOT_PATH_NS(@"/Library/Application Support/");

The value of this string will be like so:

  • "rootful": /Library/Application Support/
  • "rootless": /var/jb/Library/Application Support/

Compiling for rootless

As previously mentioned, the command needed to compile for rootless requires an extra argument: THEOS_PACKAGE_SCHEME=rootless. Therefore, if you normally compile for rootless with this:

make do

Then you would need to add the extra flag at the end, like so:

make do THEOS_PACKAGE_SCHEME=rootless

Do note that some libraries also need to be updated for rootless, so that is something that needs to be taken into account.

More information about adapting for rootless can be found here.

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