How to automatically sign commits with magit?

Question

I'm interested on having each of my commits signed with my GPG key. Since I use magit for interfacing with git, I was wondering if telling magit to sign each commit was possible (or some workaround to achieve this was feasible, at least).

Does Git even support commit signing? I thought only tags could be signed… — , Dec 01 '15 at 06:39
@lunaryorn `git commit -S[], --gpg-sign[=]`. There is at least one reason to sign each commit: to have stronger evidence that the commit came from the person you think it did. Signing tags only allows you to detect history changes. — Nsukami _, Dec 01 '15 at 07:03
@lunaryorn Sorry if it doesn't answer your question. Yes, Git support [commit signing](http://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Signing-Your-Work#Signing-Commits) — Nsukami _, Dec 01 '15 at 09:43

score 33 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 01 '15 at 13:25

33

In Magit commits are created using the committing popup (c). That popup would therefore be a good place to start looking for gpg support. If you do that, then you will find this:

=S Sign using gpg (--gpg-sign=)

So type = S and the select a key. To avoid having to do that every time you create a commit you can save the value of that argument (and all other currently set arguments) using C-x C-s.

You might still have to type the passphrase every time. To avoid that you should start a gpg-agent and make sure Emacs knows about it, e.g. using the keychain shell script and the keychain-environment Emacs package.

Also see and set the --show-signature argument in the logging popup.

answered Dec 01 '15 at 13:25

tarsius

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Has this been changed in `transient`? – tejasbubane May 12 '19 at 17:05
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This argument is now hidden by default. The transient announcement explains how to show it by changing the "level". – tarsius May 12 '19 at 21:50
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In case anyone stumbles here looking: https://magit.vc/manual/transient/Enabling-and-Disabling-Suffixes.html – tejasbubane May 13 '19 at 06:10
@tarsius I don't seem to be able to change the level. How do I set about doing that? Thank you. – e18r Jun 20 '19 at 17:28
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Which part of the documentation that tejasbubane linked to is unclear? – tarsius Jun 20 '19 at 19:36

score 23 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 01 '15 at 13:13

23

Try this in your $HOME/.gitconfig or your .git/config

[user]
    email = YourEmail
    name = YourName
    signingkey = XXXXXXXX
[commit]
    gpgsign = true

Then just commit as usual.

answered Dec 01 '15 at 13:13

csantosb

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This answer has the advantage that you can set a key per repository. It seems that magit's `=S` option sets the key in `$HOME/.gitconfig`, so the same for all your repositories. – ph0t0nix Sep 12 '18 at 08:28

How to automatically sign commits with magit?

2 Answers2