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troubleshooting.md

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Troubleshooting the keybase command line

This is a list of problems that people run into frequently.

pinentry doesn't work.

We use pinentry in situations where we need a password, but there are many exciting ways for it to break. Here are a couple examples of what that looks like:

$ keybase login
▶ INFO Forking background server with pid=2409
How would you like to sign this install of Keybase?

(1) Use an existing device
(2) Use a paper key
(3) Use my Keybase passphrase
Choose a signing option: 2
▶ ERROR GETPIN response didn't start with D; got "ERR 83918849 Permission denied <Pinentry>"

$ keybase decrypt -i my_encrypted_message
▶ ERROR GETPIN response didn't start with D; got "ERR 83918950 Inappropriate ioctl for device <Pinentry>"

These errors can be an interaction of several different things:

  • What version of pinentry you have in your PATH. Some of them try to create a graphical window but fall back to the terminal. Some do only one of those things.
  • Interesting terminal gymnastics. Running in screen or tmux can confuse the curses versions of pinentry. Depending on where you first started tmux, you might also end up with an invalid DISPLAY environment variable.
  • Curious account permissions. If you log into your desktop as userfoo, and you run something like sudo -u userbar keybase login, that might prevent pinentry from creating windows.

One workaround for these problems is to disable pinentry, so that keybase reads your password as ordinary terminal input. Use the --pinentry flag to do that:

keybase --pinentry=none login

To make that configuration permanent, you can run:

keybase config set -b pinentry.disabled true