credstore

Cross-platform credential storage — OS keyring with AES-encrypted file backup.

A standalone secret manager that ships with Slife but has no dependency on it. Declares three runtime dependencies: keyring, keyring-wincred, and keyrings-cryptfile.

Supports Windows, macOS (GUI + headless), Linux (desktop + headless), and WSL (Windows Credential Manager via a PowerShell bridge).

Install

Requires Python ≥ 3.13.

pip install credstore
# or, in an isolated environment:
uv tool install credstore

One-click installers (install uv if needed, then uv tool install credstore):

# macOS / Linux / WSL
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/juzcn/slife/main/credstore/install.sh | bash

# Windows PowerShell
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/juzcn/slife/main/credstore/install.ps1 | iex"

Uninstall with uninstall.sh / uninstall.ps1 (user data under ~/.credstore/ is left in place).

Verify: credstore status

No configuration needed. Run credstore set-password to enable encrypted backup.

CLI

All secret entry uses masked input — each keystroke echoes *, paste works, the actual value is never displayed or logged.

Interactive terminal required. Every command except status and uninject reads from an interactive TTY (@requires_tty); run them from a real terminal, not a piped shell or CI step.

Setup

credstore set-password    # creates ~/.credstore/credentials.crypt (or change the master key)

Path overridable via the CREDSTORE_FILE env var.

Commands

¹ set, copy, and reset-backup are gated up front — they refuse to run until the master key has been set (credstore set-password). ² remove prompts for the master key to clean the cryptfile copy; the keyring copy is removed regardless. ³ Master password prompted only if a cryptfile exists.

--shell accepts auto (default), bash, powershell, or cmd.

get Modes

-p mode performs a dual-query consistency check:

• Both stores have the value AND they match → prints plaintext
• One store missing → error with recovery instructions
• Values differ → error, tells you which tool to run

Cryptfile-only mode (no system keyring available — e.g. Linux where keyctl is blocked by policy): the AES cryptfile is the sole store. set/copy write there with a notice, status reports "cryptfile-only mode", and get -p returns the cryptfile value directly (no dual-query mismatch possible).

⚠️ CLI-only. The Python API (get_credential, exists_credential, resolve_uri) reads the system keyring only and returns None in cryptfile-only mode — it never prompts for the master password. Consumers that rely on password-free startup resolution (like sLife) therefore do not support cryptfile-only mode — use the CLI (credstore get KEY -p) or, for sLife, shell environment variables (fully supported, since sLife checks os.environ before credstore).

inject / uninject

inject reads a secret from the keyring and persists it to the system environment:

When stdout is a TTY, inject prints an activation hint instead of the secret. The actual export command only flows through a pipe.

eval "$(credstore inject DEEPSEEK_API_KEY)"           # Bash/Zsh — activate now
Invoke-Expression (credstore inject DEEPSEEK_API_KEY)  # PowerShell — activate now

uninject reverses the operation — removes from registry or profile and prints the unset command.

Default (bare) Output

  KEY                  SYSTEM KEYRING   CRYPTFILE        ENV    STATUS
  ────────             ──────────────   ──────────────   ────   ──────
  ANTHROPIC_API_KEY    ✔                ✔                —      synced
  DEEPSEEK_API_KEY     ✔                ✔                ✔      synced
  OPENAI_API_KEY       —                ✔                —      cryptfile only
  ────────             ──────────────   ──────────────   ────   ──────
  3 credential(s) — synced: 2, cryptfile only: 1, env: 1

On macOS and Linux the system keyring cannot be enumerated (no list API), so the SYSTEM KEYRING column is derived from the cryptfile and env. Only Windows and WSL enumerate Credential Manager directly.

Memory Safety

Secrets are immutable Python str objects — they cannot be zeroed in place. Mitigations:

1. Never batch-load — list collects only key names. Sync comparison fetches one value at a time and immediately dels it.
2. Prefer existence checks — exists_credential() / list_credential_keys() never return secret content.
3. Explicit cleanup — every CLI handler dels secret references on all exit paths including error branches.

masked_input() echoes * per keystroke — paste works, actual value never displayed.

Python API

import credstore

# Read / check / delete (system keyring only, no prompt)
credstore.get_credential("myapp/api_key")      # → str | None
credstore.exists_credential("myapp/api_key")   # → bool  (NEVER returns secret)
credstore.list_credential_keys()               # → list[str]  (NEVER returns values)
credstore.set_credential("myapp/api_key", "sk-…")
credstore.delete_credential("myapp/api_key")   # → bool

# keyring: URI resolution
credstore.is_keyring_uri("keyring:myapp/k")    # → True
credstore.resolve_uri("keyring:myapp/k")       # → the secret value (or KeyError)
credstore.parse_keyring_uri("keyring:srv/k")   # → ("srv", "k") | None

# Shell formatting
credstore.format_export("KEY", "secret", "bash")   # → "export KEY='secret'"
credstore.format_unset("KEY", "bash")              # → "unset KEY"

# Environment persistence (programmatic form of `inject` / `uninject`)
credstore.persist_key("KEY", "secret", "bash")     # registry (Win) / profile (Unix)
credstore.unpersist_key("KEY", "bash")             # remove from system environment

# Diagnostics
credstore.init_store()              # → CredentialStore (explicit lazy init)
credstore.check_backend()           # → {"available": True, "backend": "…", …}
credstore.get_backend_name()        # → "system keyring + cryptfile (dual-write)"

Python API talks to system keyring only — no master password, no prompt. Dual-write (keyring + cryptfile) is handled by the CLI. Two exceptions worth noting:

• set_credential() writes only to the system keyring, but it still requires the master key to have been set (credstore set-password run once — the cryptfile must exist) and raises RuntimeError otherwise. This is deliberate: a secret is never written to the keyring without an encrypted backup to survive OS password changes. It never prompts.
• get_credential() and resolve_uri() return None / raise KeyError in cryptfile-only mode; only the CLI can read the encrypted backup.

Callers of get_credential() and resolve_uri() must del the returned value after use. Prefer exists_credential() when you only need to know if a credential exists. reset_credentials() exists internally for the CLI (reset-keyring) but is not part of the public package API.

Configuration

The encrypted credential file's path is resolved by precedence:

1. CREDSTORE_FILE=<path> (env var)
2. ./credentials.crypt (dev — when the current directory is the Slife source root, i.e. its pyproject.toml has project.name == "slife")
3. ~/.credstore/credentials.crypt (default, standalone use)

Architecture

Backend Matrix

Backend selection is deterministic by platform — no keyring auto-discovery. Exactly five platform configurations are supported; anything else is rejected with a clear error.

WslBackend (priority 9.5) and KeyutilsBackend (priority 1.5) are also registered as standard keyring.backends entry points, so they participate correctly in keyring's own priority chain for external consumers — but credstore's own dispatch selects them directly, never by discovery.

Dual-Write Flow

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  CLI (__main__.py)                               │
│  Interactive: masked_input(), master password     │
│  Atomic dual-write: cryptfile → keyring           │
│  Rollback on keyring failure                      │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  Python API (__init__.py)                        │
│  Programmatic: no prompt, system keyring only     │
├────────────────────┬─────────────────────────────┤
│  System Keyring    │  Cryptfile Backup           │
│  (primary)         │  (encrypted)                │
│  ────────────────  │  ───────────────────────    │
│  Win CredMan       │  keyrings.cryptfile         │
│  WSL (PowerShell)  │  AES-encrypted INI          │
│  macOS Keychain    │  Survives OS pw changes     │
│  Linux keyutils    │                             │
└────────────────────┴─────────────────────────────┘

WSL Backend

On WSL, no Linux desktop keyring is available. WslBackend bridges to Windows Credential Manager by calling powershell.exe with embedded C# that P/Invokes advapi32.dll (CredReadW, CredWriteW, CredDeleteW). Because it targets CredMan directly, WSL and native Windows share the same credential store — credstore set on either side is visible on the other. It also reads the native-Windows layout (TargetName = service, key in the UserName field) so credentials written by WinVaultKeyring resolve correctly on WSL. Unlike platform auto-discovery, WslBackend is selected deterministically (no priority roulette).

Keyutils Backend

On Linux (desktop and headless alike), KeyutilsBackend stores credentials in the Linux kernel's persistent keyring (@p). Calls add_key and keyctl syscalls directly through ctypes — zero Python dependencies beyond stdlib. Each credential is a "user" key with description "credstore:<service>/<key>". Unsupported CPU architectures are rejected rather than guessed. If the kernel keyring is unavailable (e.g. keyctl blocked by seccomp on an HPC login node), credstore degrades to cryptfile-only mode: set stores in the AES backup with a notice, set-password/status/get -p/remove keep working, and the reason is visible in credstore status. A fully unsupported platform still raises rather than picking a wrong backend.

macOS Backend

macOS uses keyring.backends.macOS.Keyring (the login keychain) in GUI sessions. For headless macOS (CI, servers) — where login-keychain interaction would fail with errSecInteractionNotAllowed — set CREDSTORE_KEYCHAIN to an isolated keychain path, or let credstore use ~/.credstore/credentials.keychain-db; the file is created automatically via security create-keychain on first use.

Credential Enumeration

credstore (the default, no-command view) reads keys from the OS credential store using platform-specific APIs:

Enumeration retrieves key names only — secret values are never batch-loaded. Sync comparison fetches one value at a time and immediately discards it.

License

MIT