Secrets

This repo stores secrets in conf/secrets/owais.yaml and decrypts them with SOPS.

NixOS

conf/shared.nix imports sops-nix and reads the age key from:

/var/lib/sops-nix/key.txt

It exposes these secrets:

• /run/secrets/keys_gh
• /run/secrets/keys_codeberg
• /run/secrets/keys_tangled

The files belong to user owais, group users, with mode 0600.

SSH uses those paths in the Home Manager config.

Local SOPS commands

Use the local age key when editing or reading the encrypted file from the repo:

SOPS_AGE_KEY_FILE=$(pwd)/age.txt sops conf/secrets/owais.yaml
SOPS_AGE_KEY_FILE=$(pwd)/age.txt sops -d conf/secrets/owais.yaml
sops updatekeys conf/secrets/owais.yaml

Non-NixOS key extraction

conf/scripts/keys.sh extracts Git SSH keys to:

~/.local/share/sops/

It expects the age key at:

~/.config/sops/age/keys.txt

Run:

mkdir -p ~/.config/sops/age
cp age.txt ~/.config/sops/age/keys.txt
./conf/scripts/keys.sh

The script writes:

• ~/.local/share/sops/keys_gh
• ~/.local/share/sops/keys_codeberg
• ~/.local/share/sops/keys_tangled

It also sets file mode 0600.

SSH config outside NixOS

Use normal home-directory paths outside NixOS:

Host github.com
  HostName github.com
  User git
  IdentityFile ~/.local/share/sops/keys_gh
  IdentitiesOnly yes

Host codeberg.org
  HostName codeberg.org
  User git
  IdentityFile ~/.local/share/sops/keys_codeberg
  IdentitiesOnly yes

Host tangled.sh
  HostName tangled.org
  User git
  IdentityFile ~/.local/share/sops/keys_tangled
  IdentitiesOnly yes

Set permissions:

chmod 700 ~/.ssh
chmod 600 ~/.ssh/config ~/.local/share/sops/keys_*

Check secrets

sops -d conf/secrets/owais.yaml >/dev/null
ls -l /run/secrets/keys_*
ssh -T [email protected]

On non-NixOS, check the extracted key path instead of /run/secrets/.

Common failures

If SOPS cannot decrypt, check that SOPS_AGE_KEY_FILE points at the right age key.

If NixOS rebuild fails on secrets, check that /var/lib/sops-nix/key.txt exists on that machine.

If SSH ignores a key, check file permissions and confirm that the IdentityFile path matches the distro.