This is a simple TOTP (Time-based One-time Password) CLI tool. TOTP is the most common mechanism for 2FA (Two-Factor-Authentication). You can manage and organize your accounts with namespaces and protect your data with a password.

Install

Download the latest version of the application from the releases page or using the go tool:

go install github.com/yitsushi/totp-cli@latest

Alternative

I'm not the maintainer of the MacPorts or the Homebrew package, if it's outdated please contact with the maintainer.

Users on macOS can also install the package using MacPorts:

sudo port selfupdate
sudo port install totp-cli

or Homebrew:

brew install totp-cli

Signing key

On release, there is a checksum file for all generated artefacts. This file is signed with the 66EA13043E6CDBA67A5D85AB71BD3AD93E8B6ABF GPG key.

gpg --keyserver keys.openpgp.org --recv-keys 66EA13043E6CDBA67A5D85AB71BD3AD93E8B6ABF
gpg --verify totp-cli_{{.Version}}_checksums.txt.sig

Upgrading from totp-cli v1.2.7 or below

Starting with totp-cli v1.2.8 a more secure storage format is used. The storage will be upgraded the first time it is written to by totp-cli. You can force this to occur by running totp-cli change-password.

Help output

totp-cli help

NAME:
   totp-cli - Authy/Google Authenticator like TOTP CLI tool written in Go.

USAGE:
   totp-cli [global options] command [command options] [arguments...]

VERSION:
   v1.8.0

AUTHOR:
   Efertone <[email protected]>

COMMANDS:
   add-token, add   Add new token.
   change-password  Change password.
   delete           Delete an account or a whole namespace.
   dump             Dump all available accounts under all namespaces.
   generate, g      Generate a specific OTP
   import           Import tokens from a yaml file.
   instant          Generate an OTP from TOTP_TOKEN or stdin without the Storage backend.
   list             List all available namespaces or accounts under a namespace.
   set-prefix       Set prefix for a token.
   set-length       Set length for a token.
   rename           Rename an account or namespace
   help, h          Shows a list of commands or help for one command

GLOBAL OPTIONS:
   --help, -h     show help
   --version, -v  print the version

Usage

When you run the application for the first time, it will ask for your password. DO NOT FORGET IT! There is no way to recover your password if you forget it.

Your first command (after help) would be add-token. You can get your token read a TOTP QR Code.

totp-cli add-token

Namespace: personal
Account: digitalocean
Token: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Password: ***

You can specify the namespace and the account name as a parameter:

totp-cli add-token personal randomaccount

Token: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Password: ***

If the provider uses a different length for tokens, you can set it on add-token or set with set-length.

totp-cli add-token --length=8 personal randomaccount
totp-cli set-length personal randomaccount 6

If you want to delete randomaccount (because it was a test for example), you can use delete:

totp-cli delete personal.randomaccount

Password: ***
You want to delete 'personal.randomaccount' account.
Are you sure? yes

After few accounts, it's a bit hard to remember what did you added, so you can list namespaces:

totp-cli list

Password: ***
company1 (Number of accounts: 3)
company2 (Number of accounts: 5)
personal (Number of accounts: 8)

or you can list your accounts under a specific namespace:

totp-cli list personal

Password: ***
personal.evernote
personal.google
personal.github
personal.ifttt
personal.digitalocean
personal.dropbox
personal.facebook

If you want to change your password, you can do it with the change-password command.

Some providers require the user to prefix the generated token with their password or passphrase. You can set a prefix for each account with set-prefix, or set with add-token.

totp-cli set-prefix ns account
Prefix: myprefix

totp-cli add-token --prefix=asd personal randomaccount
totp-cli set-prefix personal randomaccount asd

# Clear prefix
totp-cli set-prefix ns account --clear

To generate an OTP, you simply use the generate command like:

totp-cli generate namespace account
Password: ***
889840

You can also use the --follow flag on the generate command if you want to have the OTP token automatically refreshed once expired:

totp-cli generate --follow namespace account
Password: ***
889840
343555
463346

If the provider is very strict with the code, with the --show-remaining flag will add extra information about how long the code will be valid.

totp-cli generate --show-remaining namespace account
Password: ***
316762 (remaining time: 17s)

Changing the location of the credentials file

Simply put this into your .zshrc (or .{YourShell}rc or .profile):

export TOTP_CLI_CREDENTIAL_FILE="/mnt/mydrive/totp-credentials"

Or call the client with TOTP_CLI_CREDENTIAL_FILE:

$ TOTP_CLI_CREDENTIAL_FILE=/mnt/mydrive/totp-credentials totp-cli list

The default location is ${HOME}/.config/totp-cli/credentials.

Note: It's a filename not just a directory.

Note: It does not traverse through the given path, parent directory has to be there already.

Import

You can import tokens from a YAML file. The syntax is the same as the output of the dump command.

- name: ns1
  accounts:
    - name: acc1
      token: updatedtoken
    - name: acc2
      token: mytoken
    - name: acc3
      token: tokenish
- name: ns2
  accounts:
    - name: acc1
      token: token
      prefix: myprefix

If a token already exists, it will ask you if you want to overwrite it or not.

totp-cli import list.yaml

Shell Completion

Disclaimer: I don't have much expertise with auto-complete integrations. The following instructions should be enough, but it is possible they are not. Feel free to open a Pull Request with any additional suggestions/fixes either in the docs or the autocomplete scripts.

• Bash: autocomplete/bash_autocomplete
• Zsh: autocomplete/zsh_autocomplete

Zsh

A function to provide tab-completion for zsh is in the file autocomplete/zsh_autocomplete. When installing or packaging totp-cli this should preferably be installed in $prefix/share/zsh/site-functions. Otherwise, it can be installed by copying to a directory where zsh searches for completion functions (the $fpath array). If you, for example, put all completion functions into the folder ~/.zsh/completions you must add the following to your zsh main config file (.zshrc):

cp autocomplete/zsh_autocomplete ~/.zsh/functions/_totp_cli
fpath=( ~/.zsh/completions $fpath )
autoload -U compinit
compinit

Bash

mkdir -p ~/.local/share/bash-completion/completions
cp autocomplete/bash_autocomplete ~/.local/share/bash-completion/completions/totp-cli

About the password

The password should never be passed directly to any applications to unlock it. If you save it in a variable it can be exposed if your ENV is exposed somehow, if you directly type in the password in the command line, it can end up in your bash/zsh/whatevershell history.

Mostly to support CI/CD automation, there is an option to set the password/passphrase as an environment variable. Please use it only if you know the system is safe to store passwords in environment variables.

If you really want to skip the password prompt, it reads from stdin, so you can pipe the password.

❯ age \
  --encrypt \
  --armor \
  --recipient age15velesv0zwpsc5w0n4da5tv64u9fzuhl8hjpvdmeayjg00fdf4wsxl834c \
  > "${HOME}/.config/totp-cli/totp-password.age"
myapssword
^D

❯ age --decrypt --identity ~/.age/efertone.txt ~/.config/totp-cli/totp-password.age | totp-cli list
Password: ***
....list of namespaces

❯ age --decrypt --identity ~/.age/efertone.txt ~/.config/totp-cli/totp-password.age | totp-cli generate xxxxx xxxxx
Password: ***
166307

❯ alias totp-pass-in="age --decrypt --identity ~/.age/efertone.txt ~/.config/totp-cli/totp-password.age"

❯ totp-pass-in| totp-cli generate xxxxx xxxxx
Password: ***
889840

Other option is to use an environment variable:

❯ age \
  --encrypt \
  --armor \
  --recipient age15velesv0zwpsc5w0n4da5tv64u9fzuhl8hjpvdmeayjg00fdf4wsxl834c \
  > "${HOME}/.config/totp-cli/totp-password.age"
myapssword
^D

❯ export TOTP_PASS=$(age --decrypt --identity ~/.age/efertone.txt ~/.config/totp-cli/totp-password.age)
Password: ***

❯ totp-cli generate xxxxx xxxxx
166307

But I'm really against it, it's a password that can access all your stored 2FA tokens. With the password (even without the totp-cli application) and the credentials files, that file is not really encrypted anymore as it can be decrypted with the password.

Please, never store your password as clear-text. Never. Pretty please.