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Like this question, I am looking for a password repository and that I can use to feed my programs and scripts with those passwords.

I found seahorse which seems to have what I need under the "Login" folder but I am not quite sure where the passwords are stored (for backup) and I don't know how to get the passwords in shell so I can pipe them into my scripts. I was under the impression that I can use gpg to access those passwords, but I don't quite know how.

Is it possible to access (and create) those passwords in terminal?

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Seahorse is a GUI frontend to the Gnome keyring. The libsecret library comes with a command line utility called secret-tool which lets you access the Gnome keyring from the command line or a script.

Examples of secret-tool usage: for mutt, for mutt, in a shell script, in a CentOS Docker container, in a systemd unit file.

For backup purposes, the keyring file is in ~/.local/share/keyrings.

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  • Could you add an example on how to query passwords saved in seahorse with that tool? I cannot make it work ... See also
    – pLumo
    Commented May 27, 2020 at 15:04
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    Okay, if you know an attribute and its full value you can query it, but it seems not possible to do a fuzzy/regex search for e.g. the label.
    – pLumo
    Commented May 27, 2020 at 15:27
  • @pLumo secret-tool search …. But indeed I think you need to know at least one attribute. If you don't, I think the next most convenient tool is the Python API. I used it in the past to automatically change passwords. Beware that the API isn't stable, I don't know if that script still works today.
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Commented May 27, 2020 at 16:04
  • @Gilles'SO-stopbeingevil' you might be delighted to learn about lssecret: askubuntu.com/a/1155765/207933
    – Frederick Nord
    Commented Dec 8, 2020 at 8:43
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    Would be nice to have an example to see how you could retrieve real stuff out of it. E.g. secret-tool lookup signon_realm https://lwn.net/ (note that the value must be identical, I wasted a bit of time when avoided / at the end) will retrieve password for this site.
    – 0andriy
    Commented Nov 3, 2021 at 14:56

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