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🐰 Svetlana Zaiats
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Sign here please!

In December my working laptop decided to add some fun to my life, and for whatever reason my commits stopped being signed by me. I discovered it when I tried to merge approved PR for new feature, and Github didn’t allow me to do it.

It’s always confusing when everything worked fine 2 hours ago, you didn’t do anything related to git or configuration of system/IDE — and somehow world changed and now you need to fix it. It’s part of software engineering that I enjoy whenever.

How to start signing commits again (for Github)

  1. Check if you have generated ssh key in your Github account (if you don’t have one — use Github documentation for generating a new one).

  2. Check that your git user is the one you want to sign with

Terminal window
git config user.email
  1. Configure signing commits in git, where path_to_ssh is something like /Users/szaiats/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub
Terminal window
git config --global gpg.format ssh
git config --global user.signingkey <path_to_ssh>
git config --global commit.gpgsign true
  1. Configure allowed signers - put there your information "{email} namespace=git {ssh key}", for example:
Terminal window
touch ~/.config/git/allowed_signers
git config --global gpg.ssh.allowedSignersFile ~/.config/git/allowed_signers
echo "svetzayats@gmail.com namespaces=\"git\" /Users/szaiats/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub" >> ~/.config/git/allowed_signers
  1. Check settings of your IDE. I use vscode and I needed to “Enable Commit Signing” to make signed commits from UI; otherwise I need always commit with -S flag:
Terminal window
git commit -S -m "My signed commit"
  1. Verify that everything works
Terminal window
git log --show-signature -1

This one, by the way, helps a lot in debugging why a commit might not be signed. It shows information about problems if there are any.

Also you can check signature verification status on Github — in commits section

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