PassOut

A really simple password manager built on gpg.

Why?

I use a lot of programs that require passwords, e.g. offlineimap/msmtp/... (you do too). To avoid having to memorise these passwords you either:

Put them in clear text in a config file, e.g. .netrc.
Use a password manager such as gnome-keyring, pwsafe, keepassx, etc.

The former is obviously annoying. The latter works, but I found that these tools were either too heavyweight, or required me to type the master password every time I needed to access the password store.

Therefore, I hacked up PassOut; a super-mega easy password manager written in Python 3. You can set it up in minutes.

Dependencies

GPG.
Python 2.7 (3 may work also).
xclip (for clipboard support only).
A GUI pinentry program, e.g. gtk-pinentry-2 (for X11 integration only).
PyGTK (System tray integration only).

Quick Start

Generate a GPG key (if you don't yet have one):

gpg2 --gen-key

For info on this step, see the GPG docs for more info: http://www.gnupg.org/gph/en/manual.html#AEN26

Tell PassOut about your key:

mkdir ~/.passout && echo -e "gpg=<your_gpg_binary>\nid=<your_gpg_id>\n" > \
	~/.passout/passoutrc

Where <your_gpg_binary> is the path to the gpg binary you want to use (I recommend using version 2) and <your_gpg_id> is the email address associated with the gpg key you want to use with PassOut.

Now add your passwords, e.g. to add a password named 'my-email':

passout.py add my-email

You will be prompted for the password. The password will not echo. Passwords are stored GPG encrypted in ~/.passout/crypto_store.

Generate a random password (default length of 20)

passout.py generate my-email
or
passout.py generate my-email 50

To retrieve a password to stdout:

passout.py stdout my-email

You will be prompted to unlock the GPG keychain and the password will be printed.

Similarly, you can put the password in the X clipboard like this:

passout.py clip my-email

X11 Integration

If you don't want to type your GPG password every time, you can use gpg-agent with your X11 session. If you are using a .xinitrc or a .xsession (i.e. you use startx or xdm) then you can add something like:

eval `/usr/local/bin/gpg-agent --daemon --pinentry-program /usr/local/bin/pinentry-gtk-2`

Obviously tweaking paths for your platform. You will now only need to unlock the GPG key upon first use after X11 login, and then periodically when the gpg-agent cache expires. To tweak the expiration time, pass a --max-cache-ttl argument to gpg-agent.

You can also run passout.py tray to place an icon in your desktop environment's system tray. Right click the icon and select a password name to have the password placed in the system clipboard.

If someone knows how to integrate with gdm/kdm, please send a pull request.

License