passman

passman

passman is an offline command-line tool for managing your passwords.

Installation

To install from source, you need to have Go installed. Issuing the following command will download and install passman and its dependencies:

$ go get github.com/tvdburgt/passman

Currently, only go1.2 and greater is supported for the following systems: linux/386 and linux/amd64.

Getting started

Creating a passman store

passman stores the passwords and other related data in an encrypted file called store. In order to create a store, simply type:

$ passman init
[enter passphrase]
[verify passphrase]
Initialized empty passman store at '/home/tman/.pass_store'.

You will first be prompted for passphrase. This passphrase will indirectly be used as a key to encrypt and decrypt your store. As you can see, the default store file is $HOME/.pass_store. An alternate file location can be enforced using the $PASSMAN_STORE environment variable or the -file or -f command-line flag (in increasing order of precedence). The store file location can be specified similarly for the other passman subcommands.

If you want to migrate from a different password manager, say KeePassX, you can use passman import to import entries from an exported XML file:

$ passman import -format keepassx /tmp/keepassx.xml 
Imported 42 entries to '/home/tman/.pass_store'.

Adding and modifying entries

Adding new password entries and modifying existing entries is done with the passman set command. Entries are distinguished and referenced by a unique human-readable identifier. For example, to create an entry for my GitHub account, I can use the id github accompanied with my username tvdburgt:

$ passman set -name tvdburgt github

This command will prompt for a password to be associated with this entry. You can fill this in manually or generate one to your liking.

Aside from name and password, arbitrary key-value entry data can be attached using the -meta flag:

$ passman set -meta url=https://github.com/login \
    -meta description='My favorite coding site!' github

Querying entries

To show the contents of an individual entry use passman get:

$ passman get github

Listing all entries is handled by the passman list command.

$ passman list

For simplicity reasons, passman does not maintain an entry hierarchy. It encourages the user to devise a personal scheme by incorporating hierarchy information in the naming of entry identifiers.

The passman list command conveniently accepts a regex pattern argument, which can be used to group entries. For example, by using a directory-like identifier scheme, I can easily list all entries that start with a given subpath:

$ passman list ^news/
news/hn
news/reddit
news/slashdot

[replace with actual list output]

Exchanging entry data

To put the password of my github entry on the system clipboard, simply type:

$ passman clip github
Listening for clipboard requests...            
[wait 20 seconds]
Timeout reached. Exiting.

This will make the password available for selection requests for a limited amount of time. Other entry fields can be copied as well:

$ passman clip -fields url,name,password github
Listening for clipboard requests...            
Field "url" requested by "Iceweasel"
Field "name" requested by "Iceweasel"
Field "password" requested by "Iceweasel"
All field values are copied. Exiting.

The above command will subsequently copy the metadata value of key url and field name and password for the following consecutive selection requests.

Additional information

The complete list of commands can viewed with passman help. Use passman help <cmd> for more information about a particular subcommand. If you are interested in passman's security or want to help improve this program, please read the technical documentation.

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