DEV Community

Cover image for Signed Git commits in VS Code
Andreas
Andreas

Posted on • Updated on • Originally published at Medium

Signed Git commits in VS Code

The time had come to fix something that had been bugging me for a long time: Still making unsigned Git commits from VS Code.

TL;DR: Add "git.enableCommitSigning": true to settings.json of VS Code* after configuring your singing key ID and upload your public GPG key to your Git server.


I am a fan of green badges. Wherever possible, I’m trying to achieve them. I love when my browser shows the little green lock for websites served over HTTPS or when my taskbar shows the little green lock for an active VPN connection. Green badges indicate confidence and security. They give me the positive feeling, that the trustworthiness of someone or something was proved and certified. In times, where the Twitter account of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was hacked by simply duplicating his phones SIM card, it surely would be a good idea, to verify a tweet with more than just the senders phone number and reward a secure verification with a corresponding badge. So I try to provide as many green badges as possible for visitors, users and contributors of my work.

For most of my projects I use VS Code on Windows for creating and GitHub for publishing my code. The built-in Git integration in VS Code turned out to be extremely useful and fast for frequent Git commands. And now I wanted VS Code to sign my commits without additional effort or being interrupted to switch to the terminal.

Git supports signed commits for quite a while now (January 2012) and signed tags even longer. This means, Git provides the possibility to verify that commits are actually from a trusted source using the GNU Privacy Guard (GPG). GitHub marks signed commits with a green “verified” badge.

This is how it worked for me in VS Code on Windows:

Set up GPG

First you have to install GPG, if you don’t already have it. You can verify your installation (i.e. with Windows Power Shell) like this:



$ gpg --version
gpg (GnuPG) 2.2.17
libgcrypt 1.8.4


Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

If your system doesn't know them yet, you have to import your public and private keys (I assume you have them stored in files called public.key and private.key). If you don’t have a key pair, you can generate a new one. In that case, you can skip the import and directly jump to Set up Git. It's also possible to use your Keybase GPG key, if you have one (Stephen Rees-Carter wrote a nice article about it).



gpg --import public.key
gpg --import private.key


Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Note: when importing the private key, a GUI window appears that asks for the corresponding passphrase you set when creating your key pair.

Set up Git

Now you can tell Git your signing key ID. It’s a 16-digit alphanumeric string that can be found with gpg --list-signatures (look for lines starting with “sig”).



git config --global user.signingkey 26A64778F76A7911


Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

If you want, you can tell Git to sign commits per default (since Git 2.0), so you don’t always have to add the -s flag in the command line:



git config --global commit.gpgsign true


Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Note, that I use the --global flag here to apply these settings to all my local repositories. Of course you can apply these settings only to the current repository without it.

Set up GitHub

Now you have to give GitHub (or whatever Git server you’re using) your public key. You can print it with gpg --armor --export or get-content -path public.key (or open it with your favorite text editor) and copy it to your clipboard. Now go to GitHub, click on the top right menu, go to Settings > SSH and GPG keys > New GPG key and paste your key — it should look like this:



-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
...a lot of characters...
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----


Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

If everything worked correctly, you should see your GPG key like this:
New GPG key entry on GitHub (example)

New GPG key entry on GitHub (example)

Set up VS Code

Finally you have to tell VS Code to append the -s flag to the git commit command, to use signed committing now. Open the settings, search for “gpg” and check the box “Enables commit signing with GPG”.

Alternatively you can add this line to your settings.json :



"git.enableCommitSigning": true


Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

And that’s it! Now you can commit your changes in VS Codes Git integration and sign your work.

Note that you will be prompted for the passphrase of your private key at first.

Your commits now look like this in a GitHub repository under “commits”:
Green badge indicating that this commit was signed with a verified signature

Green badge indicating that this commit was signed with a verified signature

This badge also appears under “releases”, if the last commit of this release was signed:
Verified release on GitHub

Verified release on GitHub

Error: secret key not available

Well, would have been too easy if it worked at first try… unfortunately I had to deal with the following weird error message, that appeared always when I tried to commit using the -s flag:



$ git commit -am "a message" -s
gpg: skipped "26A64778F76A7911": secret key not available
gpg: signing failed: secret key not available
error: gpg failed to sign the data
fatal: failed to write commit object


Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

After some research, I found, that I had to tell Git the path to the GPG executable (for whatever reason) using the git config pgp.program setting:



git config --global gpg.program "C:\Program Files (x86)\gnupg\bin\gpg.exe"


Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Note that the path may be a different one on your system.

After this, everything worked like a charm! Feel free to leave a comment, if you are facing other issues or you’d like to make me feel guilty because you already sign your commits for years :)


Edited: 2nd July 2021 (added TL;DR paragraph)
Originally published: 18th September 2019 on Medium

Top comments (32)

Collapse
 
pavelloz profile image
Paweł Kowalski • Edited

Thank you so much for this post. Very good stuff

I didnt manage to do it myself, but thats probably just me and one day it will work ;)

Edit: Fixed.
I had to use GPG Keychain for mac os to make it work. ;)

Collapse
 
devmount profile image
Andreas

You're welcome, glad I could help! And thanks for the GPG keychain hint!

Collapse
 
sivaraam profile image
Kaartic Sivaraam

Nice post. It would be nice to have TL;DR at the top of the post that just covered the following content:

Finally you have to tell VS Code to append the -s flag to the git commit command, to use signed committing now. Open the settings, search for “gpg” and check the box “Enables commit signing with GPG”.

Alternatively you can add this line to your settings.json :

"git.enableCommitSigning": true

And that’s it! Now you can commit your changes in VS Codes Git integration and sign your work.

Collapse
 
devmount profile image
Andreas

Great suggestions - done. Many thanks (and sorry for the late reply - didn't see any notification about your comment).

Collapse
 
thebouv profile image
Anthony Bouvier

Make sure to look up the discussion around whether you should auto-sign or not.

Linus Torvalds for instance is against it.

I personally do auto-sign my own work.

Just suggesting that you look into the discussion and make your decision.

Collapse
 
devmount profile image
Andreas

Thank you Anthony for your suggestion!

I found this thread where Linus describes his opinion about auto-sign commits. But I'm not really sure I understood his point correctly... For me it sounds more that he argues for a different use case: the verification of the integrity of a release (git tags) or entire project. For me it's more about verifying the authorship of single commits.

Collapse
 
drazisil profile image
Molly Crendraven
Collapse
 
rugglcon profile image
Connor Ruggles • Edited

The one problem I've come upon is on Mac, if you haven't put your passphrase in for a while, VSCode doesn't prompt you for your password, you have to commit from the terminal. This is solved by using GPG Suite, as it permanently caches your credentials, but without using this you're unable to commit every ~2 hours from the interface and have to use the terminal.

Otherwise, great post.

Collapse
 
devmount profile image
Andreas

Thank you for this addition 👏🏻

Collapse
 
matiaslgonzalez profile image
Matías González

Good article! Though I don't know if I'm understanding the subject incorrectly but I think the git commit flag needed to sign (in the sense of using you gpg keys to sign the commit) is -S and not -s. I'm assuming that the "git.enableCommitSigning": true option is adding -S correctly. My git man pages reads:

-s, --signoff
           Add Signed-off-by line by the committer at the end of the commit log message. The meaning of a signoff
           depends on the project, but it typically certifies that committer has the rights to submit this work under
           the same license and agrees to a Developer Certificate of Origin (see http://developercertificate.org/ for
           more information).
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode
-S[<keyid>], --gpg-sign[=<keyid>]
           GPG-sign commits. The keyid argument is optional and defaults to the committer identity; if specified, it
           must be stuck to the option without a space.
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode
Collapse
 
nicolaerario profile image
Nicola Erario

Now I have my green badge on my commits, thank you! Good write( only the “import” section wasn’t clear to me ).

Collapse
 
devmount profile image
Andreas • Edited

Nice 👏🏻!
And thank you for your feedback! Any suggestions how to improve the "import" part? I'll try to update it soon!

Collapse
 
nicolaerario profile image
Nicola Erario

In reality, I haven’t to import nothing: after the key are created, go straight to “set up git” section; to setup GitHub, then, with the command gpg —armor —export you can copy/paste the public key to GitHub settings. Furthermore I discovered that git on windows came bundled with own gpg executable so, using your guide with git bash, the “Error: secret key not available” section is useless (git can commit without to declare the path because it uses its own). Last trick: you can leave the pass phrase blank so you don’t need to write it to commit. Ps: sorry for the formatting, I’m on mobile

Thread Thread
 
devmount profile image
Andreas • Edited

Thank you Nicola, I've updated the post accordingly! The "import" part now covers the key creation case and gpg --armor --export command.

Yes, if you don't have any issues with this error message, you don't have to specify the path. It was just meant for those, who are facing the same problem as I did.

I wouldn't recommend using a private key without a passphrase for security reasons. But yes, you're right: you don't have to use a passphrase.

Collapse
 
thefern profile image
Fernando B 🚀

That's pretty cool, I need to get mine setup. Awesome read!

Collapse
 
devmount profile image
Andreas

Thank you 😊! I'm glad this post is useful for you!

Collapse
 
gizmecano profile image
P. Mergey • Edited

This kind of article is exactly what I expect to find on this platform: something which is supplementing documentation by adding some specific case studies (i.e. your last part about unavailability of secret key).

That being said, to come back to the subject, once the key has been created and the VSC editor settings have been properly configured, the recurring appearance of the Pinentry dialog window in order to type passphrase each time you are ready to commit something is particularly annoying (and it doesn't seem easy to define an convenient storage of this password currently).

Collapse
 
devmount profile image
Andreas

Thank you for your comment (I didn't get notified about it, seems like this is a general issue on dev.to for new comments on old articles)! I'm totally with you here - though you get used to it at some point, it's nevertheless additional effort.

I see if I can find a convenient way to save this password on a trusted device. I will update the article accordingly if I found something.

Collapse
 
supermario_ai profile image
SuperMario

For me, I had to add a Carriage Return after -"----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----" and before "-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----" to get it to work, but otherwise killer write up Fam! Thank you for this! ❤💯

Collapse
 
mitch1009 profile image
Mitch Chimwemwe Chanza • Edited

Thanks for this guide. i guess i don't have to make the same post i will share it. i have been using this feature on my account but a few week ago i came across a problem where every time i want to push changes to my repo it gives me this error:

  Git: fatal: the receiving end does not support --signed push
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

i have to use the terminal and include

--signed=false
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

for any push to work and it keeps my green badge status
any help on this guys.
Thanks for you help.