Shell-secrets – GPG-encrypted environment variables
41 comments
·April 17, 2025viraptor
upofadown
Age doesn't even have a keychain. You are expected to maintain your keys manually. So yeah, you will never have a problem with the age keychain. In the same way you will never get into trouble with the law in an anarchy. Not everyone wants to have to deal with all the details themselves.
mgarciaisaia
Oh - so age would be a gpg replacement, and not a shell-secrets replacement. I guess it could work, but also I haven't had any issues with GPG yet (in my ~4 years regularly using shell-secrets).
ejson2env sounds nice. Don't like the syntax of `eval $(...)`, but it does THE thing that most don't - it encrypts the secrets at rest!
Also, I have multiple logins for some services (company account vs company's client account), so separating concerns is cool. And having the "context" name in the PS1 helps avoid issuing the wrong command on the wrong account - you can even add emojis to the name for maximum discernability.
theteapot
The tool is just pulling one encryption key from your local GPG keyring. What's to maintain?
viraptor
What happens when you have multiple matching keys? What happens when your key expires? What happens when the output format changes? What happens when the key expires and it's attached to a hardware device? Gpg can fail in ways which do not tell you anything about the real underlying issue.
I promise this happens all the time to people for lots of stupid reasons.
theteapot
> What happens when you have multiple matching keys?
Use keyid instead.
> What happens when your key expires?
GPG will refuse to use it for encryption. Create a new encryption key.
> What happens when the output format changes?
N/A here (?)
> What happens when the key expires and it's attached to a hardware device?
You got me.
akoboldfrying
age looks really interesting, thanks. I also learned from that page that appending ".keys" to your GitHub profile URL (so https://github.com/yourusername.keys) returns a list of your SSH public keys! (Where is this documented...?)
tomjakubowski
Another trick with github urls: you can append .patch or .diff to any PR or commit URL, and you'll get back a git-formatted patch or diff.
https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/139966
woodruffw
The more general version of this is probably sops[1].
(A general problem with these kinds of “wrap GPG” tools is that you end up with “mystery meat” encryption/signatures: your tool’s security margin is at the mercy of GPG’s opaque and historically not very good defaults.)
theteapot
This is 13 lines of Bash plus GPG which is available ~everywhere and a pretty lowish level Linux dependency. SOPS is +20KLOC of Go with support for cloud KMS etc etc. I think you got your mystery meat analogy backwards.
aborsy
GPG man page is long. But to be fair, GPG, which I have used for decades, has never failed me.
mgarciaisaia
I didn't know about sops, thanks for sharing!
Encrypting YAML files' values may be handy for another project - will take note of it.
ykonstant
Since GPG and openssh support the TPM for some operations, I am tempted to store secrets in the TPM instead; I think a hardware safe is better than messing with persistent envars and having to pay attention to children etc.
But I am very nervous about doing so, since I have heard bad things about the reliability of the TPM (limited writes or something?) and locking myself out of important places. Any people with experience using the TPM for secrets in Linux?
hnlmorg
Coincidentally I’ve written something similar to this too.
My main takeaway was that GPG isn’t nearly as user friendly as it needs to be.
mmh0000
Highly true. Yet. If you complain or even offer patches (which will, always, without fail, be rejected).
You'll get told off by the GPG devs with something along the lines of "encryption is supposed to be hard".
upofadown
I have been following the GnuPG mailing list for some years now. I must of missed that. Could we have some references to where someone has been told something to the effect of "encryption is supposed to be hard".
9dev
How hard would it be to devise an easy to use wrapper on top of GPG, kind of porcelain-like?
ognarb
It already exists and it's called Kleopatra. It's developed by KDE with some support from the GPG developers and is part of the Gpg4Win suite.
It's used by quite a few companies and public administrations.
akerl_
The easier and more productive thing is to make an easy-to-use tool that does a specific workflow vs trying to be a swiss army knife.
https://github.com/FiloSottile/age is this for encrypting files.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signify_(OpenBSD) and https://jedisct1.github.io/minisign/ are this for signing files.
Signal/Whatsapp/etc that use the Signal Protocal are this for messaging.
It turns out solving one problem at a time and ending up with a bunch of purpose-built tools is way easier to get right than trying to jam an entire toolbox into one thing.
emmelaich
There's a library wrapper, https://www.gnupg.org/software/gpgme/index.html
>GnuPG Made Easy (GPGME) is a library designed to make access to GnuPG easier for applications. It provides a High-Level Crypto API for encryption, decryption, signing, signature verification and key management. Currently it uses GnuPG's OpenPGP backend as the default, but the API isn't restricted to this engine. We have, in fact, already developed a backend for CMS (S/MIME).
thayne
You may be interested in https://sequoia-pgp.org/
It isn't exactly a wrapper, but it has an easier to use interface (as well as a more gpg compatible interface).
Valodim
The correct way to do stuff like this these days with openpgp is to use a SOP (stateless openpgp) implementation. https://www.openpgp.org/about/sop/
vcdimension
I've forked the repo and created a zsh version: https://github.com/vapniks/shell-secrets
bitbasher
Couldn't you just use pass and have something like this in your bash script/env:
export SOME_SECRET="$(pass show some/secret)"
Piraty
this in a credentials file to source before doing some operation? sure. I usually do: ` ( . ./credentials && ./the_thing ) ` so the secrets are only in the subshell and don't linger in my shell session forever.
but don't put that in <shell>rc , as it a) will be visible for all other (child) processes of your shell b) will spawn pinentry everytime the agent's cache ttl expires
varenc
That hides it in the source, but doesn't hide it in the execution environment that can access the ENV. Everything you run inside your shell could still read it. (but if you're running untrusted things...you've already lost)
asveikau
I do something like this in my .muttrc. It was showing up in documentation iirc, as the typical way to store credentials for mutt.
ognarb
I like the idea. GPG encryption are super helful when sharing secrets.
Disclaimer: I work on some UI for GPG as my day job.
pluto_modadic
for a newer password manager... https://github.com/FiloSottile/passage
qyckudnefDi5
Looks like FiloSottile may have switched from passage to 1Password:
https://bsky.app/profile/filippo.abyssdomain.expert/post/3l5...
Would be interesting to get more context why move from storing passwords locally to an online service.
FiloSottile
Team sharing with a non-technical person, mostly.
I still have high-value passwords and CLI credentials in passage + age-plugin-yubikey.
dvektor
I store my secrets in gpg encrypted files and inject them into my environment in my shell rc file.
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=$(gpg -d ~/.secrets/aws/key.asc)
type of deal. its annoying to put in a password every time i open a new tmux pane but hey, better than plain text.
mgarciaisaia
That was what I did before knowing about shell-secrets. But I also need different "contexts" on the same domains/tools (different AWS accounts and credentials for different clients), and having none "set" by default prevents me from running _whatever command_ by mistake the majority of the time.
viraptor
If you're using more complicated systems than just a single root account, have a look at https://github.com/99designs/aws-vault too.
Unless you're good at actually maintaining your gpg keychain and need other people to access this, I really wouldn't bother with gpg. There are way better and simpler options.
Age has a simpler interface and SSH key support https://github.com/FiloSottile/age
ejson2env has the environment variable integration and ejson has multiple backends https://github.com/Shopify/ejson2env
direnv can support any cli secrets manager per project directory https://direnv.net/
I've dealt with enough "why did this break" situations with gpg secrets files used by capable teams that I'd never recommend that to anyone. And unless you really need the public key support (teams and deployment support), you're unlikely to gain anything better over a password manager.