Visual Studio Code asking to authenticate 'Default keyring' everytime I start

Question

I started using Linux lite 5.0 on my laptop last month. (I am fairly new to the Linux enviroment, just migrated from Windows 10).

So I installed Visual studio Code using snap and everytime I start it up, it asks to authenticate 'Default Keyring' until next reboot.

Is there anyway I can authorize it so I don't have to authenticate it everytime i reboot my pc?

(p.s the reason i moved from windows to linux is because my pc got hacked some weeks prior, so please consider security a major concern here)

Thanks in advance :)

Answer 1

In GDM+GNOME, when you login, GNOME Keyring is automatically unlocked. However, it doesn't do so in SDDM+KDE. When you start some GNOME or Electron application like VS Code, they ask you to type the login password again.

The solution is to edit /etc/pam.d/sddm and add pam_gnome_keyring.so like this (the second line and last line):

#%PAM-1.0
auth     include        common-auth
auth     optional       pam_gnome_keyring.so
account  include        common-account
password include        common-password
session  required       pam_loginuid.so
session  include        common-session
session  optional       pam_gnome_keyring.so auto_start

This is a solution that I found here that should work for you. For me, the lines were already there, but I simply had to remove the - at the beginning of the lines.

EDIT: To edit the file, you'll need root privileges, so I did sudo -e /etc/pam.d/sddm in terminal, edited the lines, hit CTRL+X, and Y to save.

Answer 2

For anyone using VSCode on Windows / WSL - this is the solution https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/live-share/issues/1782#issuecomment-1053563079

Go to your wsl terminal and install seahorse if you don't have it.

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install seahorse

Run seahorse

seahorse

You should see a popup for GnuPG keys. Click on the back button, then right-click on default keyring, and click delete. After entering your keyring password, your default keyring should be gone.

But now vscode asks you to create one every time. To fix this remove gnome-keyring:

sudo apt-get remove gnome-keyring

Credits go to Austin Jerry (upsurge0)

Answer 3

This has nothing to do with visual studio, keyrings is a package in your system used to store your passwords read more about keyrings here

to solve your problem open gnome-shell and search: "seahorse"

open it and you will find all your keyrings setup, the default one is what you want, select it right-click to edit or delete it if you are not remembering the password

But NOTE before you delete it any configurations with this keyring "default keyring" will be deleted with it too

Answer 4

I was using Chrome OS. The Linux Terminal (AKA. crostini).

The "keep asking keyring" problem was caused by the keyring directory does not exist. So VS Code cannot save the keyring there.

The solution is simply create the directory. You may use the following command.

mkdir ~/.local/share/keyrings

Answer 5

Asking to unlock the [default] keyring on startup for no reason really sucks, yepp. However, modifying the pam stack or removing keyring just because of a single misbehaving application is IMHO nothing what one should do. Instead the app should be fixed.

For code 1.80 one may use the option --password-store=basic on startup to get rid off it. Another option is to rename the app which gets invoked to ask for the passphrase, e.g. on Ubuntu 20.04 in a GNOME env sudo mv /usr/libexec/gcr-prompter /usr/libexec/gcr-prompter.disabled (package gcr) would do that. However, this is a system modification and thus other apps would be affected, too - therefore not really a good idea.