Git does not ask me for gpg passphrase and fails my commit

Question

When I do git commit -a -S -m "Commit Message", I get this error:

You need a passphrase to unlock the secret key for
user: "Username (Gpg Key) <email-id>"
2048-bit RSA key, ID 2487BE7C, created 2016-10-03

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

But, it doesn't even ask/prompts for my passphrase when I commit. So, how and where do I enter my passphrase while using gpg's -S flag?

Are you sure gpg can read input? If stdin is closed, you would see the above error message. If the git command is not run in an interactive shell, then you might need to have gpg-agent running in order to handle the passphrase input. — G. Sliepen, Oct 03 '16 at 10:47

score 40 · Accepted Answer · edited Jul 11 '21 at 01:43

40

I had the similar thing. I had the gpg and gpg2 binaries, both pointing to GPG version 2.0.30. I wasn't being prompted for my passphrase.

In your bash profile (I did it in my .zshrc file) add the following line:

export GPG_TTY=$(tty)

edited Jul 11 '21 at 01:43

Koray Tugay

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answered Nov 10 '16 at 13:19

DiegoRBaquero

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Thanks a lot, this works for me in my bash on macOS. – gpanda Jun 28 '17 at 16:40
Forgot all about `.zshrc` I've been trying this from other posts but in my `.bashrc` whoops! This worked, thanks! – CTS_AE Aug 28 '20 at 09:34

score 11 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 25 '19 at 02:45

It stopped prompting me, so I had to kill the daemon

ps aux | grep gpg
mark              3129   0.0  0.0  4397952    820   ??  Ss    8Mar19   0:28.84 gpg-agent --homedir /Users/Mark/.gnupg --use-standard-socket --daemon
mark             18137   0.0  0.0  4286492    848 s000  R+    3:43pm   0:00.00 grep --color=auto --exclude-dir=.bzr --exclude-dir=CVS --exclude-dir=.git --exclude-dir=.hg --exclude-dir=.svn gpg

then

sudo kill -9 3129

Then it worked. It may be a slightly different issue.

This solved the issue for me. Seems like I exited the previous prompt in a bad way which confused the daemon. — Antonio Martinović, Jun 24 '19 at 09:24

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 16 '16 at 04:36

1

If you are using OSX. It seems like a gpg update (of brew) changed to location of gpg to gpg1, you can change the binary where git looks up the gpg:

git config --global gpg.program gpg1

See this medium blog post.

answered Oct 16 '16 at 04:36

Andy Hayden

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For me it's still gpg but it won't ask for password and fail. Any other recommendation? – DiegoRBaquero Nov 04 '16 at 22:52

Git does not ask me for gpg passphrase and fails my commit

3 Answers3