GPG Setup

This will help you through the creation of a cryptographic key pair for signing software releases.

GPG Setup

This guide presumes you have gnupg installed. Installing gnupg is a matter of doing an apt-get or yum install or installing via homebrew on OSX. On Mac you can also install GPGTools, see below.

NOTE : Fedora has by default a gnupg client and agent. So it should just work out of the box.

I'm using gnupg 2 on this tutorial, but everything applies to v1 too, being the only difference that v1's executable is gpg and v2 is gpg2.

GPGTools on Mac

• Download and install GPGTools
• it might be the case that a symbolic link to its gpg-agent is missing. If that's the case create it with (inside of the /usr/local/bin directory:

ln -s /usr/local/MacGPG2/bin/gpg-agent gpg-agent

Generating your keypair

1. Run gpg and let it create the config folder. Usually it goes under $HOME/.gnupg
2. Run gpg --gen-key
3. Select RSA and RSA
4. Accept the default keysize (2048)
5. Set key expiration - usually 2 years (2y) is a good compromise for beginners.
6. Confirm key expiry date
7. Add your Real Name, like John Doe Moe
8. Add your email address - note that you can have more than one
9. no comment is needed
10. you need to generate a passphrase for your key, and this is the kind of password that needs to be strong.

Testing your setup

Okay, now that you have your keys,let's try to sign and to decrypt a file.

1.Choose or create a test file that we will sign, for instance foo.txt

2.Encrypt your file gpg --encrypt --recipient 'Your Name' foo.txt

3.Decrypt your file gpg --output foo.txt --decrypt foo.txt.gpg

Testing the gpg agent