Hi. I’ve created an unattended program to run automated encryption tasks using GPG.
I’ve encountered a problem with pinentry, because when gpg.exe is invoked in my program, pinentry-qt GUI pops up asking for the private key passphrase.
If I type it manually, it stays cached for maybe ten minutes and the program runs fine, but after that it’s requested again.
After digging a lot of forums and mailing lists, I found a couple of solutions which are not an option for me:
-Passing the password through a | pipe using --passphrase-fd 0
(I don’t want to harcode the passphrase).
See https://lists.gt.net/gnupg/users/71840
-Removing the passphrase:
(I don’t want to do that either).
I found here a possible solution, setting “pinentry-timeout 0” in gpg-agent.conf so I only have to type it once after each server restart and then let the program run unattended.
In this wiki a different approach to the same issue is explained: GnuPG - ArchWiki
I also read about “–max-cache-ttl n” argument.
I could configure both to something high, like a year, so the passphrase doesn’t expire.
In this forum, this user also is trying to get an unattended password working PRESET_PASSPHRASE does not skip pinentry gui dialog
The problem is that gpg-agent.conf is not present in my computer, so I cannot edit it. I’ve checked “C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming\gnupg” folder and the file is just not there or anywhere on my computer. I don’t know the formatting of the file, so I cannot create one from scratch.
Could you help me getting this working? I just need to enter the password once and let the server do it’s thing.
Thank you.