A Little pass Trick

Every morning I process my inbox containing voice notes I left myself, messages from people I need to respond to, links and notes that need to get routed to the right places. Agents help with the retrieval and routing, and a lot of that touches secrets stored in pass: API tokens, bot credentials, that kind of thing.

The problem is that the first pass call in a session prompts for my GPG passphrase. If an agent hits that mid-run, it just hangs waiting for input I’m not watching for.

So I added a simple entry called unlock. The stored value is just the word “unlocked.” Now the first thing I do in the morning is:

pass unlock

It prompts me for my passphrase, prints back “unlocked”, and that’s it. The GPG agent caches the passphrase for however long you’ve configured it, and from that point on every agent can pull secrets without interruption.