Accounts & keys

Your identity is a nostr keypair. ngit stores the secret in your OS credential store by default — git config holds the name of the credential entry, not the key itself.

Logging in

ngit account login                            # interactive
ngit account login --bunker-url bunker://...  # NIP-46 remote signer
ngit account create --name "Alice"            # new identity

--local scopes any of these to the current repository instead of globally:

ngit account login --local

Remote signers

A NIP-46 bunker keeps the secret key on another device — it never touches this machine. ngit account login interactively shows a QR code and a nostrconnect:// string; --bunker-url takes a connection non-interactively.

Where the secret goes

Storage	Behaviour
auto (default)	OS credential store, falling back to ngit's user-only file store
file	ngit's user-only file store
git-config	Plaintext in git config — must be requested explicitly

ngit account login --secret-storage file

Set it persistently with NGIT_SECRET_STORAGE or nostr.secret-storage.

Several identities

Aliases name stored signers without exposing their secrets:

ngit account login --nsec-file /private/key --alias alice
ngit account login alice                # make alice the global default
ngit account login --local alice        # make alice this repository's default

To use a non-default identity for one command, don't switch logins:

ngit --signer alice issue create --subject "Bug" --body "Details"
git -c nostr.signer=alice push origin pr/topic

--signer accepts an alias, an npub, or an exact cached profile name. It fails closed — a missing, ambiguous or invalid selector is an error, never a silent fallback to your default key.

Note that --signer covers ngit commands only. A git push needs git's own -c nostr.signer=..., because git is what runs at that point.

Seeing what you have

ngit account whoami
ngit account whoami --offline

Combines signers from local, global and system git config, the OS credential store and credentials.json. It groups aliases under their account, marks which login scopes are set, and shows which account currently wins git's scope precedence — useful when a repository-local login is shadowing your global one.

ngit account list is the same command.

Logging out

ngit account logout              # remove login config, keep the stored secret
ngit account logout --forget     # …and delete the stored secret
ngit account forget-keys <entry> # delete a preserved credential entry
ngit account export-keys         # print the nsec or nbunksec

Logging out of a repository-local login can reveal a shadowed global default — whoami will show you which.

CI and automation

Pass a key for one command without logging in:

ngit --nsec <nsec> <command>
ngit --nsec-file /private/key <command>
ngit --nbunksec <nbunksec> <command>
ngit --nbunksec-file /private/connection <command>

Prefer the -file forms in CI

--nsec and --nbunksec put the credential in the process argument list, where anything on the machine can read it. The -file variants don't.

An nbunksec is a portable established remote-signer connection — signer pubkey, client key, relays, and optional pairing secret. It doesn't contain your npub, so a one-shot use resolves the identity from the signer.

Next

• Configuration
• Commands