git - gpg onto mac osx: error: gpg failed to sign the data

Question

I installed GPG from brew.

brew install gpg

It is gnupg2-2.0.30_2.

When I commit, I do get a error message:

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Answer 1

If you’re not getting prompted at all for a passphrase, the solution may just be to install a program to facilitate that. The most common is pinentry.

brew install pinentry-mac

So installing that and trying again may get things working. But if not, another thing to do is make sure git it using/finding the right GPG program. These days you really should be using gpg2, so if you don’t already have that installed, do:

brew install gnupg2

And then, to tell git that’s the GPG program want to you, this:

git config --global gpg.program gpg2

At that point, try your commit again and things may just work.

But if not, then try this:

echo "pinentry-program /usr/local/bin/pinentry-mac" >> ~/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf

…and then try again.

Note: Per some comments below, in order for this change to take effect, you apparently might need to reboot after making the change.