boats's personal barricade

This is a tool to automatically sign git commits, replacing gpg for that purpose. It is very opinionated, and only useful if you use gpg the same way I do.

How to install

cargo install bpb

How to set up

Once you've installed this program, you should run the bpb init subcommand. This command expects you to pass a userid argument. For example, this is how I would init it:

bpb init "withoutboats <boats@mozilla.com>"

You can pass any string you want as your userid, but "$NAME <$EMAIL>" is the conventional standard for OpenPGP userids.

This will create a file at ~/.bpb_keys.toml. This file contains your bpb public and private keys.

It also prints your public key in OpenPGP format, so that you can upload it again. You can print your public key more times with:

bpb print

If you want to use it to sign git commits, you also need to inform git to call it instead of gpg. You can do this with this command:

git config --global gpg.program bpb

You should also provide the public key to people who want to verify your commits. Personally, I just upload the public key to GitHub; you may have other requirements.

How it replaces gpg

If this program receives a -s argument, it reads from stdin and then writes a signature to stdout. If it receives any arguments it doesn't recognize, it delegates to the gpg binary in your path.

This means that this program can be used to replace gpg as a signing tool, but it does not replace any other functionality. For example, if you want to verify the signatures on other peoples' git commits, it will shell out to gpg.

Storing your private key

By default, your private key is stored as a hex string in ~/.bpb_keys.toml. However, if you are uncomfortable with the possibility of someone reading your private key from your home directory, you can instead store it somewhere else. To do this, replace the key field with a program field, and bpb will run this program, expecting it to print your key to stdout.