nlock is a customisable, minimalist screen locker for Wayland compositors.
nlock uses the ext-session-lock-v1 protocol, and should be compatible with
any compositor that correctly implements it.
nlock source code can be found in a couple of places:
See the documentation.
nlock is written in Rust, and uses Cargo as it's build system. It should compile with the latest stable Rust, I haven't tested older versions.
In addition, you'll need development libraries for the following, which can probably be installed via your system package manager:
- glib
- gdk-pixbuf (optional, provides support for non-PNG image formats)
- pam (except openbsd)
- cairo
- pango (optional, provides support for system font loading)
- xkbcommon
gdk-pixbuf and pango are both optional, and are enabled with the features
gdk-pixbuf and pango respectively. These features are enabled by default,
you will need to disable them if you do not plan on using these libraries.
On OpenBSD targets, BSD Authentication is natively supported and will be selected as the authentication backend automatically, PAM is not required in this case.
With all of that, you should just be able to clone this repository, and run:
$ cargo build --releaseThe generated binary should be located at target/release/nlock.
IMPORTANT: You may need to copy the PAM configuration for nlock into
/etc/pam.d on your system. The configuration can be found in the pam
directory of this repository.
Several other projects have been very helpful during development of nlock:
- swaylock - rendering with Cairo, and general architecture.
- where-is-my-sddm-theme - the SDDM theme that nlock is based on.
nlock is licensed under the GNU General Public License Version 3, or later. See LICENSE for details.
Copyright (C) 2026, Nathan Gill