OS X GPG Tricks and Tips

Here are some OS X GPG tricks and tips for clearsign, GPG for Mail for Signing Emails, Code Signing and all the stuffs you need for development. Essentially, you are following our typical configuration on OS X (10.10 and higher) for iTerm2, ZSH, Homebrew. This is mandatory part – you must have all the components updated including XQuartz, Xcode Commandline Tools.

OS X GPG Tricks and Tips : Basics

If you are doing these works for developing and distributing software via Launchpad, basically your mind always ring – “It is OS X and Work is to be done on Ubuntu”. No, OS X is FreeBSD plus some NetBSD – it is the kind of same kernel. It is not that classic UNIX. If you read the rarely used manuals like man locate, you’ll basically see the examples with FreeBSD.

It is important to have a home-brew like package manager. You can use aptitude too! apt-get actually works on OS X. We are using Homebrew as it has the most documentation. It was better if the package manager named “App Store” was a sane species. Command line commands against App Store actually forces the GUI. To fully fix this App Store package manager, only way is to re-write the OS X as OpenSource. It is easier to use Homebrew and Cakebrew than thinking to change the World. sudo has pathetic support on Homebrew. Anyway, first check your homebrew :

Fix if there is any error. If brew update throws error like :

error: Your local changes to the following files would be overwritten by merge:
share/man/man1/brew.1
Please, commit your changes or stash them before you can merge.
Aborting
Error: Failure while executing: git pull -q origin refs/heads/master:refs/remotes/origin/master

then run

If your setup is wrong, you can not run tmux – it is an indirect test to check anything suspicious when brew doctor is not throwing any error. You should run :

not

then the gpg-agent :

automatically, there should be two symlinks, if normally symlinks fails to get created, force it :

Again run brew doctor to check if the things are fine. You can read the manuals by running gpg-agent.

OS X GPG Tricks and Tips : Setting Up the GUI Tool

The command line tool is very powerful but the GUI tool is easy. First we installed the stuffs via homebrew package manager, now we will install the GUI tool actually using the App Store package manager! The extra files are getting installed for OS X not being a Free Software. Go here :

Download and install the tool. Open this App, go to it’s “GPG Keychain” option’s preferences window and add this key server of your need, for Ubuntu Launchpad development, add :

All things will work fine. You can send an email to webmaster@thecustomizewindows.com to get an auto responded message with Padlock sign. Without this proper setup, commands like:

will not work from command line. In case of conflict, you can easily remove any component.