website/content/blog/signingcommits.md

title	date	draft	tags
Signing Commits	2020-04-11T19:59:41-04:00	false	git gpg

Git and their various hosting platforms support commit signing as an additional step of verification. There seems to be an active debate on whether it should be used regularly, though I'll describe it on here in case you want to set it up.

You'll need to have a GPG key already created.

First locate the key you want to sign with

gpg --list-secret-keys --keyid-format SHORT

This will output something like

/home/user/.gnupg/pubring.kbx
------------------------------
sec   rsa4096/8294756F 2020-04-11 [SC] [expires: 2021-04-11]
      KDIAUBEUX837DIU79YHDKAPOEMNCD7123FDAPOI
uid         [ultimate] Brandon Rozek (Git)
ssb   rsa4096/9582109R 2020-04-11 [E] [expires: 2021-04-11]

Copy the string starting with "KDI..". This will be your fingerprint.

Now tell git the key you want to sign with

git config --global user.signingkey $FINGERPRINT

To sign a commit, add a -S flag

git commit -S -m "Initial Commit"

To always sign your commits

git config --global commit.gpgsign true

Remember to add your public key to Github, Gitlab, etc. You can get it by

gpg --armor --export $FINGERPRINT