age VS git-crypt

Compare age vs git-crypt and see what are their differences.

age

A simple, modern and secure encryption tool (and Go library) with small explicit keys, no config options, and UNIX-style composability. (by FiloSottile)
Our great sponsors
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
age git-crypt
213 50
15,231 7,955
- -
5.5 0.0
about 1 month ago 3 months ago
Go C++
BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License GNU General Public License v3.0 only
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

age

Posts with mentions or reviews of age. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-13.

git-crypt

Posts with mentions or reviews of git-crypt. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-11.
  • Why Can't My Mom Email Me?
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Apr 2024
    https://github.com/AGWA/git-crypt

    And occasionally to encrypt files, or receive encrypted files.

    These are practical things which are non-theoretical.

    > Using multiple keys don't offer added security or secrecy.

    Depends on how careful you are or want to be, with your private key. My house key isn't the same as my car key isn't the same as my bike key.

    > This is nothing like data harvesting

    Alright fair, bad example. What I was grumbling about was more the lack of any clear communication that you've been auto-opted-in to a feature on protonmail, with no user interface signal indicating so, leading to confusion for a couple months like in TFA. I definitely wasn't casting shade on the opengpg keyserver, nor protonmail. It's the "hey! I didn't check a box for this, and it's not mentioned anywhere in the protonmail docs" hidden functionality which could do with some clarification.

    I'm a forgetful creature. If I intentionally put my key on a keyserver, because I'm playing around and learning about PGP, will I make the connection between it and protonmail a few months down the line if I move my email account to them? Unlikely.

    It's a nice automated feature. Protonmail-to-protonmail e2e encryption makes a lot of sense. I just think protonmail-to-non-protonmail e2e needs a tooltip in the UI, and the option to opt out, potentially with the ability to opt out for specific email addresses. I wouldn't at all assume it would be on by default even IF I've been actively using PGP in my email clients, because it's something you usually have to manually set up yourself, very explicitly. That, and 99.9% of emails are plaintext.

    Anyhoo, one thing I forgot which kind of negates the "what if I have multiple encryption keys tied to my email" is the fact that the opengpg keyserver does tie 1 email address to 1 key so you can't publish multiple encryption keys, fair enough. Git-crypt and file encryption, I set my associated email address to use +tags eg [email protected], so as far as protonmail etc are concerned there's only one key per logical email address.

  • Is it safe to commit a Terraform file to GitHub?
    4 projects | /r/Terraform | 24 Jun 2023
    Apart from a few exceptions (like ansible for example, which supports native encryption), we moved away from encrypted secrets in git repos and use external things, depending on the platform (like parameter store / secrets manager for AWS or keyvault for Azure - both of these do track changes, btw), so I haven't looked for quite a while. Back in ye olden days we used https://github.com/AGWA/git-crypt which worked quite nicely, but the key management is cumbersome and it's based on GPG, which in itself is a bit of a light redish flag these days.
  • GitHub Private Repos Considered Private-­Ish
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Jun 2023
    How about encryption?

    https://github.com/AGWA/git-crypt has been solid for me

  • Vaults vs. Cryptomator? Security, Cloud syncing, integration?
    2 projects | /r/kde | 30 Mar 2023
    The most interesting approach I've seen for this is https://github.com/AGWA/git-crypt
  • How to Deploy and Scale Strapi on a Kubernetes Cluster 1/2
    13 projects | dev.to | 3 Feb 2023
    Store the Secrets in a repo using gitcrypt or another encryption tool.
  • I moved all my input files to a private repo and used it as a submodule
    4 projects | /r/adventofcode | 17 Jan 2023
    Consider using git-crypt for transparent encryption instead.
  • [2022][Friendly Reminder] Don't commit your input files to Git
    9 projects | /r/adventofcode | 9 Dec 2022
    There‘s plugins like https://github.com/AGWA/git-crypt or https://git-secret.io that you can use to encrypt the files for yourself, so that they are available on multiple machines to you
  • How to deal with unintended information leakage when using GitHub as your GIT?
    3 projects | /r/AskProgramming | 2 Dec 2022
    There aren't really alternatives to being very very careful, tbh. But it's a bit of a smell that there are secrets kept alongside your source code. There are cases where you might want secrets in git, but if they're there on purpose you'll hopefully be doing something about it, like encrypting them first. git-crypt is useful here.
  • Ensure that an ansible secrets.yml is never committed unencrypted
    2 projects | /r/devops | 23 Nov 2022
    Use either Mozilla SOPS to encrypt the values in the file, or got-encrypt to encrypt the whole repo
  • is there such thing as "encrypting" a repo hosted on Github?
    4 projects | /r/devops | 17 Nov 2022
    https://github.com/AGWA/git-crypt for whole repo

What are some alternatives?

When comparing age and git-crypt you can also consider the following projects:

git-secrets - Commit files with sensitive information like environment secrets safely encrypted in GitHub

sops - Simple and flexible tool for managing secrets

Picocrypt - A very small, very simple, yet very secure encryption tool.

rage - A simple, secure and modern file encryption tool (and Rust library) with small explicit keys, no config options, and UNIX-style composability.

sealed-secrets - A Kubernetes controller and tool for one-way encrypted Secrets

minisign - A dead simple tool to sign files and verify digital signatures.

age-plugin-yubikey - YubiKey plugin for age

OpenKeychain - OpenKeychain is an OpenPGP implementation for Android.

gopass - The slightly more awesome standard unix password manager for teams

poetry2nix - Convert poetry projects to nix automagically [maintainer=@adisbladis]

scrypt - The scrypt key derivation function was originally developed for use in the Tarsnap online backup system and is designed to be far more secure against hardware brute-force attacks than alternative functions such as PBKDF2 or bcrypt.