Description:
qpass 2.3
The qpass program is a simple command line frontend for pass, the standard
unix password manager. It makes it very easy to quickly find and copy specific
passwords in your ~/.password-store to the clipboard. The package is
currently tested on cPython 2.6, 2.7, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6 and PyPy (2.7). It’s
intended to work on Linux as well as macOS, although it has only been tested on
Linux.
Installation
Usage
Command line
Why use pass?
GPG encryption
Git version control
SSH secure transport
History
Support for multiple password stores
About the name
Contact
License
Installation
The qpass package is available on PyPI which means installation should be as
simple as:
$ pip install qpass
There’s actually a multitude of ways to install Python packages (e.g. the per
user site-packages directory, virtual environments or just installing
system wide) and I have no intention of getting into that discussion here, so
if this intimidates you then read up on your options before returning to these
instructions ;-).
Usage
There are two ways to use the qpass package: As the command line program
qpass and as a Python API. For details about the Python API please refer to
the API documentation available on Read the Docs. The command line interface
is described below.
Command line
Usage: qpass [OPTIONS] KEYWORD..
Search your password store for the given keywords or patterns and copy the
password of the matching entry to the clipboard. When more than one entry
matches you will be prompted to select the password to copy.
If you provide more than one KEYWORD all of the given keywords must match,
in other words you’re performing an AND search instead of an OR search.
Instead of matching on keywords you can also enter just a few of the characters
in the name of a password, as long as those characters are in the right order.
Some examples to make this more concrete:
The pattern ‘pe/zbx’ will match the name ‘Personal/Zabbix’.
The pattern ‘ba/cc’ will match the name ‘Bank accounts/Creditcard’.
When a password is copied to the clipboard, any text after the first line will
be shown on the terminal, to share any additional details about the password
entry (for example the associated username or email address). The -q, --quiet
option suppresses this text.
Supported options:
Option
Description
-e, --edit
Edit the matching entry instead of copying it to the clipboard.
-l, --list
List the matching entries on standard output.
-n, --no-clipboard
Don’t copy the password of the matching entry to the clipboard, instead
show the password on the terminal (by default the password is copied to
the clipboard but not shown on the terminal).
-p, --password-store=DIRECTORY
Search the password store in DIRECTORY. If this option isn’t given
the password store is located using the $PASSWORD_STORE_DIR
environment variable. If that environment variable isn’t
set the directory ~/.password-store is used.
You can use the -p, --password-store option multiple times to search more
than one password store at the same time. No distinction is made between
passwords in different password stores, so the names of passwords need to
be recognizable and unique.
-f, --filter=PATTERN
Don’t show lines in the additional details which match the case insensitive
regular expression given by PATTERN. This can be used to avoid revealing
sensitive details on the terminal. You can use this option more than once.
-x, --exclude=GLOB
Ignore passwords whose name matches the given GLOB filename pattern.
This argument can be repeated to add multiple exclude patterns.
-v, --verbose
Increase logging verbosity (can be repeated).
-q, --quiet
Decrease logging verbosity (can be repeated).
-h, --help
Show this message and exit.
Why use pass?
In 2016 I was looking for a way to securely share passwords and other secrets
between my laptops and smartphones. I’m not going to bore you with the full
details of my quest to find the ultimate password manager but I can highlight a
few points about pass that are important to me:
GPG encryption
Git version control
SSH secure transport
GPG encryption
GPG is a cornerstone of computer security and it’s open source. This means it
receives quite a lot of peer review, which makes it easier for me to trust
(versus do-it-yourself cryptography). Because pass uses GPG to implement its
encryption my trust extends directly to pass. Of course it also helps that I
had years of experience with GPG before I started using pass :-).
Git version control
The git integration in pass makes it very easy to keep your passwords under
version control and synchronize the passwords between multiple systems. Git is
a great version control system and while I sometimes get annoyed by the fact
that git pull automatically merges, it’s actually the perfect default
choice for a password store. As an added bonus you have a history of every
change you ever made to your passwords.
SSH secure transport
I’ve been using SSH to access remote systems over secure connections for a
very long time now so I’m quite comfortable setting up and properly securing
SSH servers. In the case of pass I use SSH to synchronize my passwords between
my laptops and smartphones via a central server that hosts the private git
repository.
History
Shortly after starting to use pass I realized that I needed a quick and easy
way to copy any given password to the clipboard, something smarter than the
pass program.
I tried out several GUI frontends but to be honest each of them felt clumsy, I
guess that through my work as a system administrator and programmer I’ve grown
to prefer command line interfaces over graphical user interfaces :-). For a few
weeks I tried upass (a somewhat fancy command line interface) but the lack of
simple things like case insensitive search made me stop using it.
Out of frustration I hacked together a simple Python script that would perform
case insensitive substring searches on my passwords, copying the password to
the clipboard when there was exactly one match. I called the Python script
qpass, thinking that it was similar in purpose to upass but much quicker
for me to use, so q (for quick) instead of u.
After using that Python script for a while I noticed that case insensitive
substring searching still forced me to specify long and detailed patterns in
order to get a unique match. Experimenting with other ways to match unique
passwords I came up with the idea of performing a “fuzzy match” against the
pathname of the password (including the directory components). The fuzzy
searching where a pattern like e/z matches Personal/Zabbix has since
become my primary way of interacting with my password stores.
Support for multiple password stores
One great aspect of pass is the git integration that makes it easy to share a
password store between several devices [1] or people [2]. This use case makes
it much more likely that you’ll end up using multiple password stores, which is
something that pass doesn’t specifically make easy.
This is why I added support for querying multiple password stores to qpass in
version 2.0. For now I’ve kept things simple which means no distinction is made
between passwords in different password stores, so the names of passwords need
to be recognizable and unique.
[1]
For example I synchronize my password store between my personal laptop
and my work laptop and I also have access to my password store on my
smartphones (thanks to the Android application Password Store).
[2]
My team at work also uses pass so because I was already using pass for
personal use, I now find myself frequently searching through multiple
password stores.
About the name
As explained above I initially wrote and named qpass with no intention of ever
publishing it. However since then my team at work has started using pass to
manage a shared pasword store and ever since we started doing that I’ve missed
the ability to query that password store using qpass :-).
Publishing qpass as an open source project with a proper Python package
available on PyPI provides a nice way to share qpass with my team and it also
forces me to maintain proper documentation and an automated test suite.
While considering whether to publish qpass I found that there’s an existing
password manager out there called QPass.
I decided not to rename my project for the following reasons:
While both projects are password managers, they are intended for very
different audiences (I’m expecting my end users to be power users that are
most likely system administrators and/or programmers).
I consider the name of the executable of a GUI program to be a lot less
relevant than the name of the executable of a command line program. This is
because the GUI will most likely be started via an application launcher,
which means the executable doesn’t even need to be on the $PATH.
Let’s be honest, pass is already for power users only, so my qpass frontend
is most likely not going to see a lot of users ;-).
Contact
The latest version of qpass is available on PyPI and GitHub. The
documentation is hosted on Read the Docs and includes a changelog. For bug
reports please create an issue on GitHub. If you have questions, suggestions,
etc. feel free to send me an e-mail at peter@peterodding.com.
License
This software is licensed under the MIT license.
© 2018 Peter Odding.
License
For personal and professional use. You cannot resell or redistribute these repositories in their original state.
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