💻 Commit Signatures via SSH

First Published: 2024-02-17

The easy way to sign your git commits

In a talk by GitButler I learned about the quick, gpgless way to sign commits on git 2.34+, supported by github and all major code forges, that I'll share with you today.

As a prerequisite I assume you already have your ssh key pair that you use for authenticating with github. If not, and you somehow still use access tokens to authenticate, check out the github docs on the matter.

Locally, run the command git config --global gpg.format ssh.
Then follow it up with git config --global user.signingkey ~/.ssh/github.pub.
You may omit --global if you only want to sign commits of a specific repository. Also keep in mind to replace ~/.ssh/github.pub with the path to your public key. Then add your public key to github (again), this time changing the key type to "Signing Key".

To sign selected commits, run git commit with the -S option.
To sign all future git commits, run git config --global commit.gpgsign true.
To sign selected tags, use git tag with the lowercase -s option.
To sign all future git tags, run git config --global tag.gpgsign true.


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