Gopass - a nice password manager

Note

The use case for a password manager should be obvious - we have lots of accounts with lots of passwords, and it's not safe for all those passwords to be the same. ( though a lot of people do it, but that's their problem ) So how do we manage all these passwords and make forgetting them a thing of the past? We can use a password manager.

There's lots of password managers that run in the browser or in desktop apps for example. Since i'm a fan of the terminal world however, I naturally want to find a terminal password manager. There's pass, the ancient and awesome GNU password manager. It works great, but there are some more modern versions of it that have appeared recently. Basically pass with sugar on top.

One of those is gopass. I've been using it for a while and it's great. It can integrate seamlessly with a git repository to store its data so it can be synced between multiple machines. It uses a GPG key to encrypt everything, so your data is safe (as long as you can keep hold of your private gpg key, of course). Gopass stores the passwords in a password store on your local system.

Here's some of the basic features:

To add a new password

gopass create

You'll get a handy wizard for creating a password, it can also generate a password for you.

To view all passwords

gopass ls

It categorizes the entries nicely and provides autocompletion for them.

To copy a password to the clipboard (for a time)

gopass show -c websites/login/password

To clone an existing password store from a git repo (when syncing on another machine for example).

You'll have to add the new machine as a recipient (e.g. add its public gpg key to the store so that it can read passwords)

gopass clone repo_url

This and more can be found in this awesome gopass cheatsheet.

Having a password manager has taken a big load off my mind - remembering passwords and constantly having to reset them because I use different permutations of the same passwords for everything and can never remember which i've used.