You have installed GPG, then tried to commit and suddenly you see this error message after it:
error: gpg failed to sign the data
fatal: failed to write commit object
For understanding what's going on, first check what git is doing, so add GIT_TRACE=1
at the beginning of the command you used before (git commit
or git rebase
):
GIT_TRACE=1 git commit
With that you can see what GPG is doing: Probably you will see something like this
10:37:22.346480 run-command.c:637 trace: run_command: gpg --status-fd=2 -bsau <your GPG key>
(Check if your GPG key is correct)
Execute that gpg command again in the command line:
gpg --status-fd=2 -bsau <your GPG key>
👆🏻 With this now you could see what happened in detail!
We can have many problems, but I list what I found:
-
It could be that the GPG key was expired: https://stackoverflow.com/a/47561300/532912
-
Another thing could be that the secret key was not set properly (In my case the message said
gpg: signing failed: No secret key
as it can be see in the image below).It means that is not finding the key that was set. You would need to set up the GPG key in Git (again):
- List the secret keys available in GPG.
gpg --list-secret-keys --keyid-format=long
- Copy your key
- Set your key for your user in git
git config --global user.signingkey <your key>
-
Another popular solution that could help was shared here by @NirajanMahara: https://gist.github.com/paolocarrasco/18ca8fe6e63490ae1be23e84a7039374?permalink_comment_id=3767413#gistcomment-3767413
-
You can see in the thread of this gist other ways to find the solution to other problems. I recommend to read the Github guide for signing commits with GPG.
Hope it helps!
Thanks @paolocarrasco , Your recommendation on how to get the error message allowed me to solve this problem.
Environment
Problem
When I tried to send a change to my working branch I got the error described in the first comment. Including the debug I see the following:
Solution
In my case, setting the
pinentry
value in thegpg-agent
didn't work. But forcing theGPG_TTY
variable to have the correct value without having to install additional packages did. The error probably occurs in this environment because it is a reduced installation without a graphical environment. I have not had errors like this before in Debian.Therefore, the solution was to set the
GPG_TTY
variable and force it to be exported in new sessions.