override branding

[steverweber]

perhaps i'm missing something basic but i'm not seeing a simple way to hack in custom branding without being destructive to the native branding files or the /etc/os-release file

Perhaps simple fix is to check for an override path before OS-release variants.

$prefix/share/cockpit/branding/override
$prefix/share/cockpit/branding/$ID-$VARIANT_ID
$prefix/share/cockpit/branding/$ID
$prefix/share/cockpit/branding/default
$prefix/share/cockpit/static

ref: https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit/blob/main/doc/branding.md

[martinpitt]

This is indeed tricky right now. We don't want to encourage messing around in /usr/share, that's distribution package territorry (and in an ever-growing list of OSes it's even read-only). Supporting /usr/local/share/cockpit/branding/ would be nice, though!

As a workaround you could set up a bind mount on $prefix/share/cockpit/branding/$ID, which also isn't destructive.

[lukengda]

I expected something to be possible as it is with plugins, where a usr dir and global override would be possible:

This means that, by default the following directories are searched for cockpit packages, and in this order:

• ~/.local/share/cockpit/
• /usr/local/share/cockpit/
• /usr/share/cockpit/

(https://cockpit-project.org/guide/latest/packages)

Of course, without a login, only /usr/local and /usr/share would be considered for checking. Maybe that is not the right direction either. I also quite like the idea of a separate folder path to check that is not existing by default as proposed by @steverweber.