danielrobbins/keychain

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1077 stars · 125 forks observed · 2026-09-01

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Keychain is a Python-based CLI manager for ssh-agent and gpg-agent that maintains a single long-running agent per user and host, so passphrases are entered once per reboot. It ships as a self-contained zipapp with no third-party dependencies and writes agent environment files that shells, cron jobs, and scripts can reuse.

Use cases

• stop re-entering my ssh passphrase in every terminal
• make cron jobs able to use my ssh keys
• share one ssh-agent across multiple terminal sessions
• cache gpg signing keys so they are ready to use
• run git pushes from scripts without passphrase prompts
• manage ssh-agent on a headless server for background tasks

When to choose

• you open many terminals or editors and want one shared ssh-agent
• you need cron jobs or scripts to authenticate with cached SSH/GPG keys
• you want a single-file, dependency-free tool you can drop into PATH
• you use PKCS#11 hardware keys or GPG signing keys regularly

When to avoid

• you want a full GUI secrets manager or password vault
• you need agent forwarding management or SSH config file management
• you prefer a desktop keyring integration like gnome-keyring

Facets

cli-tool · maturity stable

security cli developer-tools security developer-tools cross-platform cli python ssh-agent gpg-agent ssh-keys passphrase-caching zipapp cron command-line linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="danielrobbins/keychain")