How to prevent gpg from creating .gnupg directory in user’s home directory

gpg

I'm trying to run use the gpg tool to encrypt and decrypt files and I would like to know if it's possible to run this tool without it changing a user's global state. Specifically, running gpg for the first time as a given user will cause it to create a .gnupg directory and other artifact's in a user's home directory.

I've had some success in isolating the operation of this command from a user's public and secret key ring (see my Ruby gem at https://github.com/rcook/rgpg for how I do this) and this is the last remaining behaviour of gpg I'd like to prevent.

Best Answer

You can pass it the --homedir argument or use the GNUPGHOME environment variable to have it use another directory instead of .gnupg. If you're scripting this, you could create a temporary directory:

GNUPGHOME=$(mktemp -d $HOME/.gnupgXXXXXX)
export GNUPGHOME

And then clean up when you're done:

gpg ...
rm -rfi $GNUPGHOME
Related Topic