Alpine, Busybox login, and PAM

By chimo on (updated on )

I recently learned that the busybox build on Alpine Linux does not include support for PAM.

You can confirm this with:

chimo@xps:~$ busybox bbconfig | grep CONFIG_PAM
# CONFIG_PAM is not set

It’s also mentioned on the Alpine Linux PAM wiki page:

The login bundled with busybox does not support PAM. Instead, one of the following may be used:

I opted for util-linux-login.

I’ll probably write the reason why I needed this in a future blog post, but I thought this was an interesting tidbit on its own.