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Reevaluating my password management (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 1 year ago by muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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It never made sense to me to put password managers in the cloud. Regards to what you intend it to do, you’re making it accessible to a wider audience than necessary. And yet, I’m using iCloud. It’s time for a change.

I’m thinking of just running a locally hosted password manager on my home server and letting my devices sync with it somehow when I’m at home. I have a VPN into my home network when I’m away that automatically triggers when I leave the house, so even that’s not that big an issue, but I’m really not familiar with what’s gonna cleanly integrate with all my stuff and be easy to use. All I know is I wanna kill the cloud functionality of my setup.

I already have a jellyfish server so I figured I would just throw this onto that. Any suggestions?

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[-] sxan@midwest.social 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Shamelessly shilling my OSS project, rook. It provides a secret-server-ish headless tool backed by a KeePass DB.

  • Headless server
  • Optional and convenient integration with the kernel keyring (on Linux), for locking the server to only provide secrets to the user's session
  • Provides a range of search, list, and get commands
  • Minimal dependencies and small code base make rook reasonably auditable

You might be interested in rook if you're a KeePassXC user. Why might you want this instead of:

  • Gnome secret-server, KDEs wallet, or pass? rook uses your (a) KeePass DB, while most other projects store secrets in their own DBs and require (usually manual) sync'ing when passwords change.
  • One of the browser secret storage? Those also keep a bespoke DB which needs to be synced, and they're limited to browser use. Rook supports using secrets in cron jobs or on the command line (e.g. mbsync, vdirsyncer, msmtp, etc, etc).
  • KeePassXC? KeePassXC does provide a secret service that mocks Gnome secret-service, but you have to keep KeePassXC (a GUI app) running even if you only rarely use the UI. Rook can also be used on a headless machine.
  • The KeePassXC command line tool? That requires entering the password for every request, making it tedious to use and impractical for automated, periodic jobs.

Rook is read-only, and intended to be complementary to KeePassXC. The KeePassXC command line tools are just fine for editing, where providing a password for every action is acceptable, and of course the GUI is quite nice for CRUD.

[-] not_amm@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

Damn, that sounds very interesting! The use of a Keepass DB instead of a new one makes it great to have as option. It's something I hadn't think about for a long time.

I'll check it out later and maybe install it after I restore my server, I'm planning to reduce my attack surface too:)

[-] sxan@midwest.social 2 points 1 year ago

If you do, use the -k option - it locks access to the rook service to only the user session. Rook works without it, but is more secure with it.

this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2025
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