How do I use Go's openpgp package?

Question

I've been looking through the documentation for Go's openpgp package, and I think I must be missing some obvious points. For example, there's a ReadKeyRing function, but no WriteKeyRing. I can, on the other hand, Serialize an Entity, but I have no way to read it back. What's going on here? Does anyone actually use this package?

Answer 1

An entity represents public+private GPG key information. The ReadKeyRing function allows you to read a list of GPG keys.

The Entity.Serialize function documentation states:

Serialize writes the public part of the given Entity to w. (No private key material will be output).

As it is only the public part of the entity, you can create a new entity with the serialized data as the public key.

A WriteKeyRing does indeed not exist. It would go through the list of entities and extract the public keys into an array.

Answer 2

I was also struggeling quite a lot with this - in the end I just learned it by example:

• Encryption and Decryption example: https://gist.github.com/jyap808/8250124
• Decryption Example: https://gist.github.com/jyap808/8250067

The thinking behind this is not made for a user, but seems to come strongly out of the actual way pgp is technically implemented.

I would suggest to generate the keys not via the package but just with a pgp command line tool.