3248182d1b
* tests/fake-pinentries/README.txt and
tests/fake-pinentries/fake-pinentry.{sh,py,pl,php}}: New public
domain (CC0) files to encourage better test suite practices from
downstream developers.
* tests/fake-pinentries/COPYING (new): a copy of
https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode.txt
Signed-off-by: Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg@fifthhorseman.net>
Fake Pinentries for Test Suites
If you're writing a test suite, it should use one of these pinentries by setting the following line in $GNUPGHOME/gpg-agent.conf:
pinentry-program /path/to/fake-pinentry.ext
Note that different fake-pinentry programs have been supplied here in different languages, with the intent of making them available to developers who have different languages available.
They are all licensed Creative Commons Zero (CC0-1.0-Universal, see the COPYING file in this directory), so they should be reusable by any project. Feel free to copy them into your own project's test suite.
Rationale
If you're implementing software that uses GnuPG, you probably want a test suite that exercises your code, and you may have some that involve secret key material locked with a passphrase. However, you don't want to require your developers to manually enter a passphrase while tests are run, and you probably also don't want to deal with alternate codepaths/workflows like using gpg's loopback pinentry.
The solution for this is to use a fake pinentry in your test suite, one that simply returns a pre-selected passphrase. In this case, all the other code follows the same path as normal, but the user interaction is bypassed because the fake-pinentry is used instead.
Troubleshooting
If you have any trouble with this technique, please drop a line to the GnuPG development mailing list gnupg-devel@gnupg.org or open a report on the GnuPG bug tracker at https://bugs.gnupg.org/gnupg