PolicyKit files are missing

Summary

PolicyKit is used to authorize requests from a client such as fwupdmgr to the daemon, fwupd. It allows running the client as a user session.

PolicyKit files are missing

This error will come up when PolicyKit files are not installed into the proper location for the daemon to use. The two important files are:

$PREFIX/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.fwupd.policy
$PREFIX/share/polkit-1/rules.d/org.freedesktop.fwupd.rules

Causes

This happens notably from two situations:

Hand install

A "hand" install that the files were not manually copied over.

• By default fwupd will install into the /usr/local.
• PolicyKit by default doesn't look in the /usr/local for policies.

Packaged

When both the snap and another packaged source (such as Debian/Ubuntu .deb) are installed if the other packaged source is removed, it will remove files that are shared with the snap.

Resolution

Hand install

Manually copy the files to your correct $PREFIX that PolicyKit looks for on your system. On most systems this will be /usr

cp /usr/local/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.fwupd.policy /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.fwupd.policy
cp /usr/local/share/polkit-1/rules.d/org.freedesktop.fwupd.rules /usr/share/polkit-1/rules.d/org.freedesktop.fwupd.rules

Packaged

• Reinstall the package you want to use.

sudo snap remove fwupd
sudo snap install fwupd --classic