How to use SSH credentials and GPG for dev container in vscode?

Question

I am using VScode on macOS and are exploring dev containers to use for development to encapsulate all dependencies required to build my Go project. I created a dev container from my existing local Git repository and installed Ubuntu with Python and Go dependencies.

If I understand correctly, but local Git repository will be obsolete and my entire project will be moved into a container. How do I setup Git in that case? it is installed but doesn't have access to my local ~/.ssh or ~/.gnupg directory.

The VScode documentation has a page called Sharing Git credentials with your container and states it should work out of the box:

The Dev Containers extension provides out of the box support for using local Git credentials from inside a container. In this section, we'll walk through the two supported options.

My local .gitconfig has set user, email and signingkey. Still a push and pull within the container leads to:

[email protected]: Permission denied (publickey).

fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

Please make sure you have the correct access rights and the repository exists.

Can anyone help me?

Tim Keegan · Accepted Answer · 2023-12-18 04:38:01Z

1

I discovered via this answer that the setting terminal.integrated.inheritEnv must be set to true for the agent forwarding to work correctly.

Without this setting the SSH_AUTH_SOCK environment variable is not set in the devcontainer. After enabling Inherit Env and reopening the project in the devcontainer SSH_AUTH_SOCK should look something like: /tmp/vscode-ssh-auth-7c68defd-3baf-4a17-83e0-b4bc9d31eb12.sock

answered Dec 18, 2023 at 4:38

Tim Keegan

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evolved · Accepted Answer · 2025-09-09 12:25:04Z

The issue is that vscode is forwarding the agent to devcontainer, but not the gpg.conf and gpg-agent.conf, so I added a mount for the local .gnupg dir to devcontainer like:

"mounts": [
    "source=/home/${localEnv:USER}/.gnupg,target=/home/vscode/.gnupg,type=bind,consistency=cached"
],

Installed gnupg2 and pinentry-curses in devcontainer (Dockerfile)

And finally made sure the following exists in gpg.conf and gpg-agent.conf:

gpg.conf:

pinentry-mode loopback

gpg-agent.conf:

default-cache-ttl 360000
max-cache-ttl 720000
default-cache-ttl-ssh 60480000
max-cache-ttl-ssh 60480000
allow-loopback-pinentry
pinentry-program /usr/bin/pinentry-curses

The setup of gpg.conf and gpg-agent.conf can be done for example in a devcontainer setup script through the initializeCommand where you can make sure no existing lines are overwritten.

Caching makes sure you don't have to enter your password every time and pinentry-program will make sure that the password prompt is taking place inside the integrated terminal and not a GUI window pop up.

An alternative approach without the mount would be to use gpg --import

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