Change pinentry program temporarily with gpg-agent

gpggpg-agent

I use gpg-agent sometimes with no X display or over ssh, so my config file contains:

pinentry-program /usr/bin/pinentry-curses

This way, the gpg passphrase is requested in curses.

That said, in some graphical scripts, I wish to use the GTK pinentry instead. How to call gpg and temporarily use a different pinentry?

Best Answer

You can use the PINENTRY_USER_DATA environment variable to give gpg information to pass to the pinentry command. You then need to set pinentry-program to a custom wrapper such as this that will run the curses or the GTK pinentry depending on that variable.

Note that this only seems to work with GPG 2.x, contrary to what the documentation of GPG 1.x says.

So with that script, you use gpg2 to use pinentry-curses and PINENTRY_USER_DATA="gtk" gpg2 to use pinentry-gtk-2.

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This causes the Keychain program to seek out both ssh-agent AND gpg-agent files. Now my encryption system does work quite seamlessly, even while relying on both types of agents.

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THIS! -> https://github.com/ecraven/pinentry-emacs

You'll have to do some wrenching, but using this thing worked for me. Put the script there into a directory in your PATH and then add the following entry to ~/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf:

pinentry-program <path-to-pinentry-emacs>/pinentry-emacs

Then reload the agent:

$ echo RELOADAGENT | gpg-connect-agent

Works like a dream for me :)

Best Answer

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