SELinux is a set of extra security restrictions on top of the normal Linux security tools. It gives the systems administrator a finer grain of control than what the kernel typically provides. But SELinux can sometimes get in your way. So, you might want to disable temporarily / permanently so that it doesn’t block you from running legit applications.
To turn it off, you will need to become the root users on your system and execute the following command:
echo 0 > /selinux/enforce
This temporarily turns off SELinux until it is either re-enabled or the system is rebooted. To turn it back on you simply execute this command:
echo 1 > /selinux/enforce
As you can see from these commands what you are doing is setting the file /selinux/enforce to either ‘1’ or ‘0’ to denote ‘true’ and ‘false’.
Configuring SELinux to log warnings instead of block
You can also configure SELinux to give you a warning message instead of actually prohibiting the action. This known as permissive mode. To change SELinux’s behavior to permissive mode you need to edit the configuration file. On Fedora and RHEL systems that file is located at /etc/selinux/config. You need to change the SELINUX option to permissive like so:
SELINUX=permissive
Note that these changes will not take effect until the system is rebooted, which is why the first section comes in handy on a system you either cannot or do not want to reboot right now.
Completely turning off SELinux
To completely disable SELinux instead of setting the configuration file to permissive mode you set it to disabled like:
SELINUX=disabled
You will need to reboot your system or temporarily set SELinux to non-enforcing mode to create the desired effect like the example above.