stackexchange/blackbox

Important note upfront: this project has been officially abandoned by its maintainers. The README states clearly that you should not use it and should not submit bug reports or pull requests. Alternatives are listed in the repository itself. BlackBox was a command-line tool for storing sensitive files, such as passwords and private keys, inside a version control repository without exposing them in plain text. It worked by encrypting specific files using GPG, which is a widely used encryption program. The encrypted versions lived in the repository, and only people who held the right GPG keys could decrypt and read them. The approach solved a practical problem for teams: you often want to share a codebase openly among colleagues but cannot include the secrets that make it run. BlackBox let you keep those secrets in the same repository, encrypted, so the rest of the code stayed accessible and shareable without leaking passwords or credentials. Each person with access had their own individual GPG key registered with BlackBox. This meant that if someone left a team, you only needed to remove their key and re-encrypt the files, rather than distributing a new shared password to everyone else. Automated systems, such as deployment scripts, could also be given their own keys so they could decrypt files during a deploy without human involvement. The tool was intentionally kept simple. It was designed as a thin wrapper around GPG to spare users from memorizing the program's complex command-line flags. The maintainers explicitly rejected requests for more advanced features and suggested that anyone needing something more capable look at alternatives like git-crypt or dedicated secrets management services. The full README is longer than what was shown.