Passta

Passta is the Password Store Terminal Assistant for pass that just works on your Mac. It retrieves your decrypted passwords for the current domain and allows you to auto-fill login forms.

Passta consists of two parts.

1. A status bar app, which you can use to search passwords and copy them to the clipboard.
2. A Safari App Extensions to auto-fill passwords in Safari using pass.

Note: Passta does not come with its own pass installation, but assumes you have already pass installed somehow and it is in your $PATH.

Features

• Search any password from the macOS status bar.
• Copy any password to your clipboard for 45 seconds using the macOS status bar.
• Automatically search passwords for the current domain in Safari.
• Autofill passwords from the list of found passwords in Safari.

Limitations

• OTP is not supported.

Table of Contents

• Requirements
• Installation
• Usage
• Contributing

Requirements

• macOS Monterey 12.4 or later
• Safari 16 or later
• pass and it's dependencies (i.e. gpg)
• A GUI-based pinentry. If the gpg-agent cache is empty, there is no way to enter a passphrase using a terminal based pinentry like pinentry-tty or pinentry-curses. pinentry-mac works great and can be installed using brew install pinentry-mac. After installing it, you have to enable it by adding the path to your GPG Agent config file with bash -c "echo \"pinentry-program `which pinentry-mac`\" >> ~/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf". Afterwards, reload you gpg-agent with gpgconf --kill gpg-agent.
• The first line of the password file has to be the password.
• The login line has to start with login: (user: or username: are currently not supported globally), followed by the username. If no such line will be found in the password file, the second line will be used as the login, no matter the key used. The following examples all work:

SuperSecurePassword
login: John Appleseed
url: https://www.apple.com/

SuperSecurePassword
url: https://www.apple.com/
login: John Appleseed

SuperSecurePassword
user: John Appleseed
url: https://www.apple.com/

Installation

You have three options to use Passta: use the Github releases, homebrew or build it yourself.

Option 1: Use the Releases

Download the latest version of the app from the releases page and drop it in your applications folder.

That’s it.

Option 2: Use Homebrew

You can install Passta using homebrew. Just run the following command:

brew install --cask rbugajewski/passta/passta

Option 3: Build it yourself

You can build Passta yourself. Follow the required steps.

Checkout and prepare

First, checkout this repository:

$ git clone git@github.com:rbugajewski/Passta.git

Now, open the passformacos.xcodeproj, go to the General tab of passformacos target. Here, check "Automatically manage signing" in the Signing section and select your own Team. Do the same for the extension target.

Click on the build button and Passta will be build. Congratulations! 🎉 You can now use your self-built Passta.

Updating Passta

Starting with version 0.7, Passta has an automatic update feature built-in. Therefore, you can use the preferences (accessed via right-clicking the status bar item), which allows you to either check for updates manually or enable automatic checks.

Usage

To the best of my knowledge, it is not possible to enable the hardened runtime for this app. Therefore, it is also not possible to get the app notarized by Apple, which is required starting with macOS 10.14.5 (last Mojave release). Therefore, you have to right-click or ctrl-click on Passta.app and select open. macOS will ask you, if you are really sure to open this "potentially malicous" app. If you confirm, you are free to use Passta.

After that, start Safari, go to Preferences and enable the extension.

The host app

Since Passta uses the host app to handle the security related password stuff, it has to run all the time. However, to give it some meaning, a status bar item is added.

Status Bar

By clicking on the status bar item or using the default shortcut shift-ctrl-p, a popup will be shown containing a search field. Here, you can search for passwords. Selecting a search result by double-click or with enter will copy the password to the clipboard, exactly as pass -c <password> does.

Settings

For settings, the status bar item has a context menu with can be accessed using right-click. Here, you can check the currently installed version, quit the app or open the app's preferences window.

In the General tab you can record your own global shortcut for Passta.

The Update tab lets you decide whether you want to check automatically for updates and the corresponding check interval. Additionally, you can search manually for updates.

The extension

The extension has two modes. You can click the toolbar item or use the same shortcut as the host app uses.

Toolbar

When you click on the toolbar item, Passta will use the current domain and search your Password Store for a matching password. Double-clicking a found password or selecting it with arrow keys and return will autofill the login form. If the password was not correctly found, you can refine the search using the search field.

Shortcut

But you can also use the shortcut from above. Passta will search a password containing the current domain as for the toolbar popover. If only one matching password was found, Passta will auto-fill the credentials and notify you with a little notification in the top right corner. If more than one matching password was found, the popover in the toolbar will show and you can manually select the correct password or refine the search.

Contributing

Any help is welcome, regardless if issue, pull request or comment. Feel free to open issues if something happens, create pull requests if you have any fixes, updates or new features or ping me via mail if you have questions. But please, be as precise as possible when creating issues. Give me as much information as possible to make it possible for me to find, reproduce and fix your issues. Finally, have a look into the contribution guide.

Thanks

• Thanks to Pass for macOS for making this fork possible.