gitmacosgnupg

git - gpg onto mac osx: error: gpg failed to sign the data

I installed GPG from brew.

brew install gpg

It is gnupg2-2.0.30_2.

When I commit, I do get a error message:

You need a passphrase to unlock the secret key for
user: "Max Mustermann (mycomment) <mm@test.de>"
2048-bit RSA key, ID 1111AAAA, created 2017-01-05 

error: gpg failed to sign the data
fatal: failed to write commit object

I used the command:

gpg --list-secret-keys | grep ^sec

and it gives me back:

sec   2048R/1111AAAA 2017-01-05

Then I used this command:

git config --global user.signingkey 1111AAAA

commit gives me back the same error message.

How can I solve this problem?

Solution

  • If you’re not getting prompted at all for a passphrase, the solution may just be to install a program to facilitate that. The most common is pinentry.

    brew install pinentry-mac

    So installing that and trying again may get things working. But if not, another thing to do is make sure git it using/finding the right GPG program. These days you really should be using gpg2, so if you don’t already have that installed, do this:

    gpg --version

    …and make sure it indicates you have GnuPG version 2+ (not version 1) installed.

    If you already have GnuPG 2+ and pinentry installed, then try this:

    echo "pinentry-program /usr/local/bin/pinentry-mac" >> ~/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf

    …or, more robustly:

    echo "pinentry-program $(which pinentry-mac)" >> ~/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf

    …and then try again.

    And you may also need to stop gpg-agent:

    gpgconf --kill gpg-agent

    You don’t need to manually restart it — it will get restarted automatically when it’s needed.

    Note: Some commenters mention needing to reboot after making changes — but it seems likely the only effect of that is to cause gpg-agent to be restarted. So manually killing gpg-agent as described above should be sufficient.