How to Fix 'gpg: decryption failed: No pinentry' on macOS

Recently, while using the pass password manager command-line tool on macOS, I encountered the following error message:

gpg: public key decryption failed: No pinentry
gpg: decryption failed: No pinentry

This issue occurs because the required dependency, pinentry, is missing. On macOS, you need to install pinentry-mac. To fix this, run:

brew install pinentry-mac

Next, configure GPG to use pinentry-mac by adding the following line to your gpg-agent.conf file:

echo "pinentry-program /usr/local/bin/pinentry-mac" > $HOME/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf

After updating the configuration, restart the gpg-agent:

killall gpg-agent
gpg-agent --daemon --homedir $HOME/.gnupg

Once the gpg-agent restarts with the new configuration, the error should be resolved when you use pass again.

That’s all for today. I hope this guide helps you resolve the issue. Thanks for reading!

References

Fixing GPG Yubikey Integration on MacOS Big Sur