gpg: can't connect to the agent: IPC connect call failed

Question

I am having a problem while trying to decrypt some keys using GPG. The following output is given to me:

gpg: can't connect to the agent: IPC connect call failed

I already edited some files, pointed in this tutorial: https://michaelheap.com/gpg-cant-connect-to-the-agent-ipc-connect-call-failed/ but with no success.

Possible reasons for that?

Answer 1

GPG2 is the recommended version, GPG1 should only be used when GPG2 is not available.

My problem is lingering S.gpg-agent* files with 0 KB of size. I removed them and problem gone, I can again use Git Bash gpg and pass-winmenu now.

It happens, because I created a password store with pass-winmenu + Git Bash gpg, and then I tried to share the same dir with WSL gpg + pass + gpg-agent, so I loaded these keys with WSL gpg once. At that moment, WSL gpg-agent created these files, but they cannot be recognised by Git Bash gpg-agent anymore.

These files work like gpg-agent socket files which are safe to be deleted if size is 0, I guess. Back up them before deleting if you want.

Answer 2

Based upon other behaviors in my Windows 10 system and through experimentation, I believe sometimes Windows Defender blocks gpg-agent from running because of a Windows Defender bug that slows the system trying to access low-level CPU counters.

Read Windows Defender can Significantly Impact Intel CPU Performance, We have the Fix. Work around the issue by downloading Counter Control from TECHPOWERUP and clicking "Reset Counters" when this problem arises. (See below.)

In my case I would frequently get the following error while trying to sign JAR files for deployment to Maven Central.

gpg: can't connect to the gpg-agent: IPC connect call failed
gpg: keydb_search failed: No agent running
gpg: skipped "…": No agent running
gpg: signing failed: No agent running

Sometimes if I kept trying over and over and over, eventually it would succeed.

Based on other answers, when this happened I trying manually connecting to the gpg-agent, but even that would time out:

> gpg-connect-agent --verbose
gpg-connect-agent: no running gpg-agent - starting 'C:\\Program Files (x86)\\GnuPG\\bin\\gpg-agent.exe'
gpg-connect-agent: waiting for the agent to come up ... (5s)
gpg-connect-agent: waiting for the agent to come up ... (4s)
gpg-connect-agent: waiting for the agent to come up ... (3s)
gpg-connect-agent: waiting for the agent to come up ... (2s)
gpg-connect-agent: waiting for the agent to come up ... (1s)
gpg-connect-agent: can't connect to the gpg-agent: IPC connect call failed
gpg-connect-agent: error sending standard options: No agent running

Because I've been experiencing similar slowdown issues on my machine seemingly related to Windows Defender, I ran "Counter Control" and sure enough, it showed that Windows Defender was maxing out the counter access as described in the article above. (Image embedded from the article.)

I tried to manually connect to gpg-agent again, but this time I hit "Reset Counters" in the utility just as gpg-connect-agent was retrying. When I did this, it immediately connected!

> gpg-connect-agent --verbose
gpg-connect-agent: no running gpg-agent - starting 'C:\\Program Files (x86)\\GnuPG\\bin\\gpg-agent.exe'
gpg-connect-agent: waiting for the agent to come up ... (5s)
gpg-connect-agent: connection to the agent established

This seems unlikely to be a coincidence that it would connect at just the moment I reset the counters. Moreover Windows Defender has been causing other slowdown problems on my machine.

I believe that buggy behavior of Windows Defender is causing this problem on my machine. Please investigate and report if you can reproduce this workaround. (Note that, as per the article, this problem only affects certain generations of Intel CPUs.)

Update: Upon further testing, I'm still getting can't connect to the gpg-agent even if I've already reset counters to prevent Windows Defender from hogging the CPU as explained above. For some reason I normally still have to manually run gpg-connect-agent. Now it may be that resetting the counters while gpg-agent was trying to connect allowed it to connect. And it could still be be that Windows Defender is stopping gpg-agent from connecting when my system starts up. But at this moment all I know is that 1) gpg-agent isn't starting up automatically, 2) I have to run gpg-connect-agent manually, and 3) even running gpg-connect-agent will time out unless I reset the CPU counters to stop Windows Defender from hogging the CPU.

Answer 3

Mine is a windows machine, and when I do git commit I get the following message. I have already configured gpg keys on my machine.

gpg: can't connect to the gpg-agent: IPC connect call failed
gpg: keydb_search failed: No agent running
gpg: skipped "BBB42EB62E25E8EB33AE2E65F40A504840B1C66B": No agent running
gpg: signing failed: No agent running
error: gpg failed to sign the data
fatal: failed to write commit object

Will Buffington answer worked for me.

I had to apply the command

gpg-connect-agent -v

repeatedly as shown below. And it worked in the third attempt.

Once the I get the message connection to agent established, I now ran the commit command again. Now its successful. Note the -S flag to sign my commits.

Update

This morning, it did not start even after 3 attempts. I had to double click the exe from its installed location.

Answer 4

I was able to connect without installing new software. In my case the issue was that the IPC file wasn't in the expected position.

Check if gpg-agent with ps -eaf | grep gpg is running and kill it if it is running with killall gpg-agent

Start gpg-agent with verbose

$ gpg-agent --daemon -v
...
GPG_AGENT_INFO=/tmp/.../S.gpg-agent; export GPG_AGENT_INFO

copy-paste the GPG_AGENT_INFO line, including the export, in the shell where you need the agent.

Answer 5

I had the same problem when I killed the agent. It was not able to connect to agent again. So I had to remove all gpg gpg-related packages, and reinstall. I had to remove gpg-agent as well. so what I did

sudo apt remove gpg gpg-agent
sudo apt-get install -y gpg 

Answer 6

In windows subsystem Ubuntu 20 works these steps:

1. sudo apt remove gpg
2. sudo apt-get update -y
3. sudo apt-get install -y gnupg1

After that steps appear "Ok"

Answer 7

Even I had the above issue in Ubuntu 20 WSL, I tried all the below | above suggestions, but none worked for me.

root@7400-9888K13:/mnt/c/Users/PKammari# wget -q -O - https://packages.cloudfoundry.org/debian/cli.cloudfoundry.org.key | sudo apt-key add -
gpg: can't connect to the agent: IPC connect call failed

What did I do to resolve the issue?

• remove gpg
• install other version of gpg.

How do I do it?
apt remove gpg ( follow the instructions)
apt install gnupg1 (follow the instructions)

Option 2. sudo apt update --y

`sudo apt remove gpg`

`sudo apt-get update -y`

`sudo apt-get install -y gnupg1` 

Proof. (refer to the screenshot):

Answer 8

I had to use:

sudo apt autoremove gpg gnupg1 gnupg2

Answer 9

apt-get install -y gnupg gnupg1
cp -a /usr/bin/gpg /usr/bin/gpg2
ln -sf /usr/bin/gpg1 /usr/bin/gpg

apt-key worked for me after executing those commands.

I'm WSL 2.0 with Ubuntu 20.04 (Windows 10 Build 2004).

Reason:

uninstalling gnupg (2.x) also uninstalls gpg-agent, which is required.

installing gnupg1 (1.x) will install only gpg binary, not gpg-agent.

Both are required to work, but we want gnupg1 (1.x) to be the default "gpg" command (despite working with 2.x support-tools).

Answer 10

For me, previous responses worked, but partially, what made the magic in my case was a combination of all, see the commands below.

If you get error add-apt-repository: command not found, then, install package software properties common.

sudo apt remove gpg
sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt-get install -y gnupg1

# In case of Error when adding "ppa" with message: add-apt-repository: command not found
sudo apt-get install software-properties-common

# Now, the hack
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rafaeldtinoco/lp1871129
sudo apt update
wget https://launchpad.net/~rafaeldtinoco/+archive/ubuntu/lp1871129/+files/libc6_2.31-0ubuntu8+lp1871129~1_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg --install libc6_2.31-0ubuntu8+lp1871129~1_amd64.deb
sudo apt-mark hold libc6 #to avoid further update

# Edit: /var/lib/dpkg/info/libc6:amd64.postinst and remove the sleep 1 that is in nearly the last line.

Answer 11

To hopefully add to preetam's excellent answer above for those very new to this.

To install gnupg1 - if you get the error "Package gnupg1 is not available, but referenced....."

sudo apt remove gpg
sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt-get install -y gnupg1 

Answer 12

On WSL1 Ubuntu 20.04 following workaround available: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/5125#issuecomment-619097534

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rafaeldtinoco/lp1871129
sudo apt update
sudo apt install libc6=2.31-0ubuntu8+lp1871129~1 -y
sudo apt-mark hold libc6

Answer 13

In my case the agent wasn't even started. This is what I did to resolve:

C:\Program Files (x86)\gnupg\bin>gpg-connect-agent -v
gpg-connect-agent: no running gpg-agent - starting 'C:\Program Files (x86)\gnupg\bin\gpg-agent.exe'
gpg-connect-agent: waiting for the agent to come up ... (5s)
gpg-connect-agent: connection to agent established
> ^Z

Afterwards the commands to the agent started working.

Answer 14

I had the same problem. In my case, the gpg config files were somehow corrupted. To solve it, I have removed all the configurations inside ~/.gnupg (make sure to backup any keys that you still need). Then I have reinstalled gpg and everything worked well.

Answer 15

There is probably already a gpg-agent running on the system, which your gpg command is unable to connect to.

If you do a pkill -9 gpg-agent and then source <(gpg-agent --daemon) to restart the agent, you should be able to connect to the pinentry-curses for inputting your password.