hyprland-wiki/pages/Useful Utilities/Hyprland-desktop-portal.md

An XDG Desktop Portal (later called XDP) is a program that lets other applications communicate swiftly with the compositor through D-Bus.

It's used for stuff like e.g. opening file pickers, screen sharing.

On Wayland, it also requires an implementation. For Hyprland, you'd usually use xdg-desktop-portal-wlr (later called XDPW)

Unfortunately, due to various reasons the -wlr portal is inferior to the KDE or Gnome ones.

In order to bridge the gap, Hyprland has its own fork of XDPW that has more features, called xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland. (later called XDPH)

{{< hint type=important >}} You don't need XDPH. Hyprland will work with XDPW, but XDPH has more features, like e.g. window sharing.

XDPH will work on other wlroots-based compositors, although limited to the XDPW features (other will be disabled) {{< /hint >}}

Installing

{{< tabs "uniqueid" >}}

{{< tab "Arch Linux" >}}

pacman -S xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland

or, for -git:

yay -S xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland-git

{{< /tab >}} {{< tab "Gentoo" >}}

Unmask dependencies

/etc/portage/profile/package.unmask

dev-qt/qtbase
dev-qt/qtwayland
dev-qt/qtdeclarative
dev-qt/qtshadertools

Apply necessary useflags

/etc/portage/package.use

dev-qt/qtbase opengl egl eglfs gles2-only
dev-qt/qtdeclarative opengl
sys-apps/xdg-desktop-portal screencast

Unmask dependencies and xdph

/etc/portage/package.accept_keywords

gui-libs/xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland 
dev-qt/qtbase
dev-qt/qtwayland
dev-qt/qtdeclarative
dev-qt/qtshadertools

btw those are the useflags that I have tested, you could also test others.

Installation

eselect repository enable guru
emaint sync -r guru
emerge --ask --verbose gui-libs/xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland

{{< /tab >}} {{< tab "Manual" >}} See The Github repo's readme.

{{</ tab >}}

{{< /tabs >}}

{{< hint type=important >}} It's recommended to uninstall any other portal implementations to avoid conflicts with the -hyprland or -wlr ones.

-kde and -gnome portals are known to cause issues.

The -kde portal is unfortunately a hard dependency of plasma-integration in Arch Linux. To uninstall it, run the command pacman -Rnsdd xdg-desktop-portal-kde, which skips all dependency checks.

Both -wlr and -hyprland installed at once will also cause conflicts. Choose one and uninstall the other.

To keep any incompatible portal installed the relvant .portal file can be moved out of '/usr/share/xdg-desktop-portal/portals/' to temporarily disable the portal. A script and the exec-once directive can be used to automate this process at startup:

#!/bin/sh
# usage: $0 portal-name [enable/disable]
# args:
#     portal-name: the name of the .portal file in /usr/share/xdg-desktop-portal/portals/ without the extension
#     [enable/disable]: optional - whether to move the file into $ENABLED_PORTAL_DIR to enable it,
#                              or to move it into $DISABLED_PORTAL_DIR to disable it. The portal will be toggled
#                              if this argument is omitted.

ENABLED_PORTAL_DIR="/usr/share/xdg-desktop-portal/portals"
# needs to be created manually
DISABLED_PORTAL_DIR="/usr/share/xdg-desktop-portal/disabled-portals"

is_portal_enabled() {
  [ -f "$ENABLED_PORTAL_DIR/$1.portal" ]
}

is_portal_disabled() {
  [ -f "$DISABLED_PORTAL_DIR/$1.portal" ]
}

enable_portal() {
  mv "$DISABLED_PORTAL_DIR/$1.portal" "$ENABLED_PORTAL_DIR/$1.portal"
}

disable_portal() {
  mv "$ENABLED_PORTAL_DIR/$1.portal" "$DISABLED_PORTAL_DIR/$1.portal"
}

remove_disabled_portal() {
  rm "$DISABLED_PORTAL_DIR/$1.portal"
}

PORTAL=$1
ENABLE=${2:-$(is_portal_enabled "$PORTAL" && echo "disable" || echo "enable")}

if [ "$ENABLE" = "enable" ]; then
  if is_portal_enabled "$PORTAL"; then
    # remove disabled portal if enabled portal exists as well,
    # as the enabled portal is most likely a newly installed version
    is_portal_disabled "$PORTAL" && remove_disabled_portal "$PORTAL"
  else
    is_portal_disabled "$PORTAL" && enable_portal "$PORTAL"
  fi
else
  is_portal_enabled "$PORTAL" && disable_portal "$PORTAL"
fi

The incompatible portal can then be re-enabled with the same script inside the autostart mechanisim of the intented environment. Keep in mind that the directory for disabled portals needs to be created manually and this script needs to have access to /usr/share/xdg-desktop-portal/portals/ and the disabled directory. {{< /hint >}}

Usage

Should start automatically.

The most basic way of telling everything is OK is by trying to screenshare anything, or open OBS and select pipewire source. If XDPH is running, a qt menu will pop up asking you what to share.

If it doesn't, and you get e.g. slurp, then XDPW is launching. In that case, try removing XDPW.

XDPH will work on other wlroots compositors, but features available only on Hyprland will not work (e.g. window sharing)

For a nuclear option, you can use this script and exec-once it:

#!/bin/bash
sleep 1
killall -e xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland
killall -e xdg-desktop-portal-wlr
killall xdg-desktop-portal
/usr/lib/xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland &
sleep 2
/usr/lib/xdg-desktop-portal &

adjust the paths if incorrect.

Debugging

If you get long app launch times, or screensharing does not work, consult the logs.

systemctl --user status xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland

if you see a crash, it's most likely you are missing qt6-wayland and/or qt5-wayland.

if you don't, make sure you don't have -kde or -gnome installed. Only -gtk will work with -hyprland or -wlr on Hyprland.