XDG Desktop Portal configuration

Without configuring portals, you may find that many desktop actions such as "open in browser" or "select a file" do not work. Not all distributions ship the necessary configuration files in their Sway package (Arch Linux is one that does it), so we need to know how to do it ourselves.

Make sure you have installed both the gtk and wlr portal backends.

Setup the environment

From xdg-desktop-portal-wlr:

Make sure XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP is set. Make sure WAYLAND_DISPLAY and XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP are imported into D-Bus.

See Systemd and dbus activation environments

If dbus implementation is dbus-broker, systemd activation environment is used:

exec systemctl --user set-environment "WAYLAND_DISPLAY=${WAYLAND_DISPLAY}" "XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=${XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP:-sway:wlroots}"

If classic dbus is used, it has its own separate one:

exec dbus-update-activation-environment WAYLAND_DISPLAY "XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=${XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP:-sway:wlroots}"

XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP should be passed through in case it was set before sway (i.e. by a Display Manager)

Set the portals Sway should use

From portals.conf(5):

Desktop environments and OS vendors should provide a configuration for their chosen portal backends in /usr/share/xdg-desktop-portal/DESKTOP-portals.conf, where DESKTOP is the desktop environment name as it would appear in the XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP environment variable.

If your distribution didn't include it with the Sway package, you'll need to create a sway-portals.conf file.

Users can override those defaults, or provide configuration for an otherwise unsupported desktop environment, by writing a file ~/.config/xdg-desktop-portal/portals.conf. Users of more than one desktop environment can use desktop-specific filenames such as kde-portals.conf which will only be used in the appropriate desktop environment.

Create ~/.config/xdg-desktop-portal/sway-portals.conf with the following settings:

[preferred]
default=gtk
org.freedesktop.impl.portal.Screenshot=wlr
org.freedesktop.impl.portal.ScreenCast=wlr

Similarly, system administrators can provide a default configuration for all users in /etc/xdg-desktop-portal/DESKTOP-portals.conf or /etc/xdg-desktop-portal/portals.conf.

Restart Sway to apply the changes.