Adding A User To An Existing GPG key

I recently came across an issue when I was signing commits that also used my business email.

github gpg unverified

I gladly learned that it’s not very hard to add an additional user id to a GPG key.

Get Current Secret Key ID

To start, we need to get our current secret key id. We’re looking for the sec{:plain} key. We can ignore the bit length

gpg --list-secret-keys --keyid-format LONG

#=> ~/.gnupg/secring.gpg
#=> ------------------------------------------
#=> sec   4096R/THISISMYKEY 2016-11-04
#=> uid                          Fernando Paredes <[email protected]>
#=> ssb   4096R/THISISMYSSB 2016-11-04

Edit Key

gpg --edit-key THISISMYKEY

--edit-key{:sh} will drop us into gpg{:sh}’s REPL. From here we can add our additional user ID:

gpg> adduid

#=> Real Name: Newt Scamander
#=> Email address: [email protected]
#=> Comment: Fantastic Beasts
#=> Change (N)ame, (C)omment, (E)mail or (O)kay/(Q)uit? O

Github

We’ll need to add our key to Github. If you’ve already added the key to Github, you’ll need to delete it and paste in your new key.

gpg --armor --export | pbcopy