This is a very quick tutorial on how to auto-type passwords from KeePassXC to a CLI application. The document is mostly for myself to remember how to do it, but feel free to add your comments and improvements.
I use KeePassXC as my main password manager. About a couple of months ago I discovered I don't need to copy passwords from KeepassXC via clipboard. I found out about the Auto-Type feature in the KeepassXC User Guide. According to the user guide, Auto-Type "acts like a virtual keyboard to populate data from your entries directly into the corresponding websites or applications that you use".
This is great for websites since I don't need any browser plugin. Instead I just press CTRL-Option-A (in my case) and let the user and password fields be auto-completed using KeepassXC. in order to do this correctly, you can configure a Window-Association. This is usually the title of a website as far as I know.
Recently I wanted to have this password auto-type feature also be available on the shell. So I started to research.
I use iTerm2 as my terminal app on Mac OS X. My default shell is zsh and I also use tmux. So quite a few layers to reconfigure in order to make this work, but luckily it only requires a few changes.
My concrete use case is the following:
- I do have a shell script
./my-backup-script.shto start my backups (based on restic) - restic asks for a password to encrypt the backup
So instead of copy pasting this from keePassXC, I wanted the password to be auto-typed.
In order to make this work, I changed the title of iTerm2 to the current executed command.
For this you need to select Job (Name) as Title in iTerm2 (go to Preferences->Profiles->Genereal->Title).
Also select the Applications in terminal may change the title option.
Then you type a command in iTerm2, e.g. ./my-backup-script.sh this will become the title of iTerm2.
You can now configure a custom Window Association in KeepassXC using the name of the script ./my-backup-script.sh.
The following picture shows how I configured Auto-Type to be used for the ./my-backup-script.sh script.
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So far so good, but I want this to work on tmux as well. So I need a way to pass the name of the current executable from tmux to iTerm2. For this we can use the following option:
set-option -g set-titles on
set-option -g set-titles-string "#T"This sets the terminal title to the tmux pane title. To set this persistently, configure this in your tmux config (~/.tmux.conf):
# source: https://superuser.com/questions/1098077/how-to-keep-terminal-window-title-in-sync-with-tmux-window
set -g set-titles on
# use the tmux pane_title
set -g set-titles-string "#T"Next we write the tmux pane title using printf. We do this before a new command is going to be executed via a zsh hook preexec. Put this into yout zshrc (~.zshrc)
# Always set the execed command as tumx pane title
# source: https://stephencharlesweiss.com/zsh-hooks
autoload -Uz add-zsh-hook
add-zsh-hook preexec custom_func
function custom_func() {
# https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9747952/pane-title-in-tmux
printf '\033]2;%s\033\\' $1
}Short summary:
- Tmux
pane titleis used to set the iTerm2 title - Tmux pane title is set by
printfcommand using thepreexeczsh hook.$1is the name of the to be executed command.
This it it :)
