keychain: Warning: can't find gpg key; skipping

Question

I'm trying to use keychain(1) with my GnuPG key on Debian Testing. However, I get the following message with this command:

$ keychain --agents gpg MYPGPKEY

 * keychain 2.8.2 ~ http://www.funtoo.org
 * Starting gpg-agent...
 * Warning: can't find MYPGPKEY; skipping

where MYPGPKEY is my actual key.

I can check that such key exits with the following command:

$ gpg --list-keys MYPGPKEY >/dev/null 2>&1 && echo "key exists"
key exists

How can I add my gpg key with keychain?

Answer 1

It looks like an output parsing incompatibility between keychain 2.8.2 and gpg 2.2.4, the two versions used in Ubuntu 18.04

I added the following to my ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf, which fixed the issue:

keyid-format LONG

Source: https://github.com/funtoo/keychain/issues/107

Answer 2

I believe the problem may be associated with your gpg and keychain version possible incompatibility. I can see that you are using 2.8.2 version which displays this error message that 2.7.0 doesn't. Stable version of Debian is using gnupg 1.4.18-7+deb8u3enter code here and Testing is using 2.1.18-6, which differ a lot. Are you using your private key ID or your subkey ID? My suggestion is changing the key ID provided to keychain

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