README for Pinentry-Rofi

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Description

Based on this gist

Simple pinentry gui using rofi written in GNU guile.

It’s similar in functionality as the gist but this one doesn’t force the width to be 27 and doesn’t depend on systemd.

I also wanted a small project which I could use to practice writing GNU guile.

3.0.0 Breaking changes please read

There is a major bug in pinentry-rofi 2.2.0 and below. The password was not encoded before giving it to gpg. Which meant that passwords including character other than alphanumerics from ASCII and `-`, `.`, `_` and `~` ended up being decoded on gpg’s side. Making them not match the input and therefore not work on other pinentry tools. See #27 for details.

Before moving to pinentry-rofi-3.0.0, please make sure to temporarily change the passwords affected by this bug to something that does not include those special characters. Make the upgrade then change back.

An alternative is to figure out what gnupg decoded the passwords too and use that as the input when using pinentry-rofi-3.0.0. And change the passwords to match what they where suppose to be.

Sorry for the headaches.

2.0.0 Breaking changes please read

As of version 2.0.0, pinentry-rofi is now built using automake. See HACKING for more info on that. It also lost its -guile suffix for the executable. And it is no longer just one file, most of its content is now a guile module, which the executable now calls.

Install

Guix (Recommended)

To install it using guix, run

guix install pinentry-rofi

Just make sure you have a version of `guix` that is newer than Jan 8 2021.

The binary location is then `$HOME/.guix-profile/bin/pinentry-rofi` were the `$HOME` is the home location of the user you used to install it with. E.g. `/home/$USER` for a normal user and `/root` for the root user.

Install it with guix is recommended as that will work on most linux distributions.

Then add it to your ~/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf

Guix on a foreign distro

If you are running guix on a foreign distro, you need to make sure the GUIX_LOCPATH environment variable is passed to the gpg-agent otherwise rofi will fail to set the locale and therefore cannot launch. Which result in the pinentry aborting.

On a distribution that is using systemd (here I’m using Arch Linux as an example) simply run:

echo "GUIX_LOCPATH=$GUIX_LOCPATH"

Copy that, then run:

systend --user edit gpg-agent.service

And add it in the override.conf:

[Service]
Environment=GUIX_LOCPATH=%h/.guix-profile/lib/locale

On my system, GUIX_LOCPATH points to the default profile i.e. $HOME/.guix-profile/lib/locale. %h in systemd gives you the path to the home directory. This should be the case for most people, but if your GUIX_LOCPATH points to something different change the override.conf to reflect that.

Arch Linux

The PKGBUILD file for arch is in the build-aux, so just run:

cd build-aux
makepkg -ic

The binary location is then `/usr/bin/pinentry-rofi`.

From Source

See HACKING on how to build this from source

Gpg-agent

To use pinentry-rofi with gpg-agent, you can set it as the pinentry-program in the ~/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf. Note that you need to use the full path to the binary.

For example for Arch Linux this would be:

pinentry-program /usr/bin/pinentry-rofi

And for guix:

pinentry-program <HOME>/.guix-profile/bin/pinentry-rofi

Where <HOME> is the full path to home for your user.

Don’t forget to restart gpg-agent for the changes to take affect:

gpg-connect-agent reloadagent /bye