Migrating a password store to another machine

I use the great pass as a password store on my Unix-like machines. It is fast, simple enough, can work on a terminal, can copy the password on the clipboard, and so on. Sometime I need to move the password store, organized into the ~/.password-store, from a machine to another to get my password at my fingertips. The following are the steps to achieve the aim.

Export your GnuPG key

pass uses gpg to store encrypted password files in the store, so the first step is to export the key:



In the above, substitute the user@foo.bar with your own key id. You can get the list of the keys and identifiers by running gpgp -k. Then, copy somehow (e.g., via scp) the key to the target machine.

Import the GnuPG key

Once you have the key, you can import the key on the target machine:

Copy the password store

You need to copy and keep in sync the password store. The method is up to you, you can use git or any other tool to synchronize the password store.

Test pass is working

On the target machine, either run pass to see the tree view of the store or pass ls, then try to get out a password to verify everything is working.

Conclusions

pass is a very powerful tool, and it can be used to quickly make your own password storage grow and be shared among different machines.