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Debugging GPG Key Issues

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The other day, I started panicking when I received an error just as I was ready to push a good chunk of work to my remote repo. It was regarding my GPG key. The solution was simple ( my key had expired, and I just had to renew it), but in my research I had found this nice Github Gist explaining a bit about what to do if you get errors when commiting:

How to understand the gpg failed to sign the data problem in git

Problem

You have installed GPG, then tried to commit and suddenly you see this error message after it:

error: gpg failed to sign the data
fatal: failed to write commit object

Debug

For understanding what’s going on, first check what git is doing, so add GIT_TRACE=1 at the beginning of the command you used before (git commit or git rebase):

GIT_TRACE=1 git commit

With that you can see what GPG is doing: Probably you will see something like this

10:37:22.346480 run-command.c:637       trace: run_command: gpg --status-fd=2 -bsau <your GPG key>

(Check if your GPG key is correct)

Execute that gpg command again in the command line:

gpg --status-fd=2 -bsau <your GPG key>

👆🏻 With this now you could see what happened in detail!

Solutions

We can have many problems, but I list what I found:

  1. It could be that the GPG key was expired: https://stackoverflow.com/a/47561300/532912

  2. Another thing could be that the secret key was not set properly (In my case the message said gpg: signing failed: No secret key as it can be see in the image below). image It means that is not finding the key that was set. You would need to set up the GPG key in Git (again):

    • List the secret keys available in GPG.
    gpg --list-secret-keys --keyid-format=long
    • Copy your key
    • Set your key for your user in git
    git config --global user.signingkey <your key>

  3. Another popular solution that could help was shared here by @NirajanMahara: https://gist.github.com/paolocarrasco/18ca8fe6e63490ae1be23e84a7039374?permalink_comment_id=3767413#gistcomment-3767413

  4. You can see in the thread of this gist other ways to find the solution to other problems. I recommend to read the Github guide for signing commits with GPG.

Hope it helps!

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