Using pass to Manage Your Passwords on Fedora

At this point, I have more usernames and passwords to juggle than any person should ever have to deal with. I know I’m not alone, either. We have a surfeit of passwords to manage, and we need a good way to manage them so we have easy access without doing something silly like writing them down where others might find them. Being a fan of simple apps, I prefer using

, a command line password manager.

It’s never been a good idea to use the same username and password with multiple services, but in today’s world? It’s potentially disasterous. So I don’t. At the moment, I’m juggling something like 90 to 100 passwords for all of the services I use. Multiple Twitter accounts, my server credentials, OpenShift applications, my FAS credentials, sign-in for Rdio, and lots more.

As you might imagine, trying to memorize all of those passwords is an exercise in futility. I remember my system password, and a handful of others. Beyond that? I’d rather save some of my brain’s limited storage for more important things.

What’s

pass

, and What’s it Require?

So what is

? It’s basically a simple command-line utility that helps you manage passwords. It uses GnuPG-encrypted files to save and manage user passwords. It will even keep them in a git repository, if you choose to set it up that way. That means you’ll need the

package installed, along with its dependencies like

,

, and

(a utility for generating passwords).

Yes, there are other options, but I settled on

a while back as the best fit for my needs. Here’s how you can give it a shot and see if it works for you!

Installation and Setup

Installing pass is simple, it’s conveniently packaged for Fedora. Just open a terminal and run

and it should grab all the dependencies you need.

The first thing you need to do is create a GPG Key. See the Fedora wiki for detailed instructions, or just use

and walk through the series of prompts. When in doubt, accept the defaults.

Now, you just need to initialize your password store with

. Replace “GPG-ID” with the email address you used for your GPG key.

Using

pass

: Adding and Creating Passwords

Now that you have a password store set up, it’s time to start creating or inserting passwords. If you already have a password you want to store, use

. For example, if you were going to store your Fedora Account System (FAS) password, you might use

with “user” being your username in FAS.

This will create a directory (FAS) and the file (user) in Git, and encrypt the file so that no one can read it without your GPG passphrase. If you look under

you’ll see a file like

. The directory part is optional, but I find it useful to help keep track of passwords.

If you want to create a new password, just use

where “FAS/user” would be the username, and the password length (generated by

) would be 12 characters. The auto-generated passwords will include upper- and lower-case letters, numbers, and special characters.

Creating a git Repository

One of the biggest selling points to me for

is its integration with git. But it’s not automatic, you do need to tell it to initialize the git repo and use it. First, make sure you’ve set your git globals:

git config --global user.email "[email protected]" 

git config --global user.name "Awesome User"

Then run

and it will intialize a git repository in your password store. From then on, it will automatically add new passwords and such to the git repo. If you want to manage passwords on multiple machines, this makes it dead easy: Just clone the repository elsewhere and keep them in sync as you would a normal git repo.

Using

pass

: Reading Passwords

To recall a password, all you need to do is run

, so

would print out the password to the terminal. But what if you don’t want it to be seen by someone looking over your shoulder?

Here’s a nifty workaround for that, just use

and it will simply copy your password to the clipboard for 45 seconds. All you have to do is run the command, move over to the application where you’d like to enter your password, and then hit Enter.

If you’ve forgotten what passwords you have stored with

, just use

and you’ll get a complete listing.

Deleting Passwords

Sometimes you need to get rid of a password. Just use

and

will ask if you’re sure, then delete the password file.

If you delete something by accident, you can simply go back and revert the commit!

Stay Safe!

So that’s the basics of using

. You can get even more examples by running

, and I highly recommend skimming the man page at least once.

I have been using

for some time now, and it’s been a life-saver. I hope it serves you as well as it has me!