I use GPG for most of my personal encryption. Basically, if i need to have a sensitive file sit at rest on my hard drive, i like to have it encrypted with GPG. Recently, I had a sqlite DB file that was encrypted with GPG for transport. It’s not updated frequently, but it holds private information (not necessarily sensitive). Thus, it was encrypted.

So i want to access this DB via some node scripts. Turns out, like most things in the JS world, there’s a package for that and it’s quite easy to use.

Setup

Install GPG

brew install gnupg
Setup your primary key

This step can be confusing if you’ve never encrypted anything. If that’s the case I’d suggest installing a GUI application for GPG on your OS.

Mac: https://gpgtools.org/
Windows: https://scand.com/products/wingpg/ (never used)
Linux (KDE): https://utils.kde.org/projects/kgpg/ (KDE)
Linux (GNOME): https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Seahorse (GNOME)

Install node-gpg in project.

npm i gpg

Now that your GPG file is setup globally, you can just use a simple method to decrypt files!

gpg.decryptToFile(
  {
    source: "./secrets.json.gpg",
    dest: "./secrets.json",
  },
  (err, success) => {},
);

EZPZ.

Decrypting GPG files in node js

Setup