Pass is a tool to store and manage passwords and other data securely and on command line – even with built in support for Git and remote Git repositories. Thus it is a welcomed alternative for existing password managers which often require a GUI, or do not provide repository support.

What it is

Pass is a shell based password manager to store passwords and login data – or anything you want, actually. The name “the standard unix password manager” however is pretty misleading: the author wanted to stress that it only uses standard Unix tools, but failed to highlight that with a catchy name and instead just created confusion.

But the author is right with his main point: pass is in fact just gluing together already well known and tested Unix tools: the encryption of all information is ensured by GPG, passwords are queried using gpg-agent, the version control and remote repository support is done by Git, and the tool itself is written in shell code. Thus you have features you can rely on – in fact, if you want you can directly access the Git repository and the Gnupg files, you do not have to use Pass at all.

Pass stores information in simple files, which can be grouped in folders. While the main idea of Pass is to store one password in one file you can actually access each file with editors to store as many information in it as you want. Each file is encrypted with the gpg key which was defined during the initial setup of Pass. As a result the Pass database is nothing else but a folder full of other folders and gpg encrypted files:

$ ls -1 $HOME/.password-store business commerce financial $ ls -1 $HOME/.password-store/business/ linkedin.com.gpg example.com.gpg important.com.gpg

Pass is included in all major distributions like Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, and so on, and thus can be installed with the usual package management tools.

How it works

If you call Pass without any further options, it just outputs the content of its password store:

$ pass Password Store |-- business | |-- linkedin.com | |-- example.com | `-- important.com |-- commerce | `-- amazon |-- financial | |-- badbank.com | `-- mybank.com

The file type ending “gpg” is not shown here to not confuse users (I guess).

Showing the content of a file is straight forward:

$ pass business/example.com login: example pass: password

Adding new entries can be done with the command pass insert $FOLDER/$FILENAME . But it might be more convenient to just use the default editor to edit a new file: pass edit $FOLDER/$FILENAME . That way multi line information can be added more easily.

However, the real strength of Pass is that after each change – like adding a new password – git-add and git-commit are called: the new file is automatically committed to a local git repository:

$ pass edit business/example.com [master 4c09c76] Added password for business/example.com using /usr/bin/vim. 1 file changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-) create mode 100644 business/example.com.gpg

As a result all changes are automatically under version control and can be reverted. But it gets better: Pass forwards arbitrary options and commands to Git itself. Thus it is possible to access the full functionality of Git – and to push the files to an online repository:

$ pass git push Counting objects: 6, done. Delta compression using up to 4 threads. Compressing objects: 100% (4/4), done. Writing objects: 100% (4/4), 823 bytes, done. Total 4 (delta 1), reused 0 (delta 0) To git@example.net:pass aa2aff7..2011296 master -> master

That way the password store can be shared with any remote Git repository – and thus can be re-used by other clients, given that they have the proper GPG key.

Missing pieces

As shown above Pass is almost perfect if you need a way to manage passwords (or any other data at all) on command line level, including repository and encryption support.

But while Pass replaced all my other password managers literally in a few minutes there is still one big feature I miss: the support for GUI tools! It would be nice if Pass support could be included in the major Desktop Environments and major GUI programs used in the Linux desktop world:

KDE’s Kwallet

Gnome’s Keyring

Android

Firefox

Chrome/Chromium

To summarize it: Pass is great, but would be even better if it could server as a backend for the usual GUI tools and desktop environments. There is already an experimental iOS client, so there is at least hope for an Android client…