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

Question

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) <[email protected]>" 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?

Answer 1

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:

brew install gnupg2 

And then, to tell git that’s the GPG program want to you, this:

git config --global gpg.program gpg2 

At that point, try your commit again and things may just work.

But if not, 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 comments below mention needing to reboot after making changes — but it seems likely the only effect that has it is to cause gpg-agent to be restarted. So manually killing gpg-agent as described above should be sufficient.