LastPass command-line interface tool | Hacker News Reader

LastPass command-line interface tool

github.com

173 pointssteakejjs69 comments

Nice... I'll reiterate the same plea I have every time LastPass comes up (I'm a premium subscriber and have been for years) - Focus on UI and UX. I don't need any more features, I just want a much higher level of polish across the Chrome Extension and Android app.

It still pops up on the top of the screen, pushing down the webpage, and since it's slow it takes a few seconds to do it so it pushes down the content while you are reading it. I've tried disabling it but it still tends to pop up - there's much more usable + pretty ways of doing it, see Chrome's built-in password manager.

Yes please! I don't need more features right now. Remove all the stuff that's useless 99% of the time. Like, do I really need to have the "password generator" option available at all times in the menu? Why does it take like 1 search and 3 clicks for me to look up a password? Why is the android app so clunky? Why do you tell me over and over and over again I have duplicate passwords? I KNOW! I'm sure there's more.

Lastpass is an excellent tool. The back end seems rock solid, but my god the UX is terrible. The latest update made it look better, but kind of made the UX worse.

Time and time again, after being frustrated with Lastpass's UX i think of how much nicer 1Password looks. I really miss that app. It's hard for me to suggest LastPass to people who aren't comfortable. I've heard people from 1Password talk about there design work. On those days of frustration, I wonder if LastPass a real UX team.

Their pop-over android app is fantastic. Though yes, focus on UI/UX for the next year, way more benefits that way.

I agree. In my opinion most password managers focus too much on delivering features that nobody really needs (most of the time at least) and far too little on user experience and polish. This is, I think, one of the reasons why so few non-technical people bother with using a password manager. I've been working on my own open source solution, which puts a clear focus on simplicity and usability[1]. I wish other companies like LastPass and 1Password would start putting more effort in making their software more accessible to non-technical users rather than trying to out-feature their competitors.

[1] http://padlock.io/

I actually went with Dashlane bacause of this. I wonder why there's no mention of it in this thread. Most of the people where I work use 1password - but since I'm on both Windows and OSX, I needed something that runs on both platforms.

Dashlane doesn't work on Linux - otherwise I'd consider it.

I use 1password on Windows and OSX and it works pretty well for both (using Dropbox sync).

This. A thousand times this.

I found LastPass essential for a team I was leading last year but it was so hard to get everyone to use it because it was so clunky.

Their Windows 8 app is utterly broken, and although I tell the Android app to remember my password it frequently makes me reenter it. I really wish they would focus on polish, I've very close to moving to a competitor.

I totally agree. Ironically I can't recommend LastPass to the people who most need it because they aren't tech-savvy enough to figure out and tolerate the UX issues.

I wish it were easier so I could get my parents using it.

I wrote most of this for LastPass. The interface is based on my own pet project, "pass" -- http://www.passwordstore.org/ -- which sticks to a more traditional model of a simple directory of gpg encrypted files, integrated with git, and you get to decide where it lives. It's a simple bash script.

I use your 'pet project' daily. Thank you so much for it!

Thanks, I abandoned LastPass after the Lavabit controversy for pass long ago and I love it.

Do you have more information about how you replaced LastPass? I currently use it, but anything better is nice. :)

Import your lastpass passwords to pass http://git.zx2c4.com/password-store/tree/contrib/importers/l... and learn the pass commands

Then get a backup solution (tarsnap or BTSync).

What about browser plugins and mobile?

It looks like there's a Firefox plugin in the works: https://github.com/jvenant/passff#readme Now we just need a Chrome one.

This is what really pulls me to LastPass. The zero to two clicks it takes to fill in a password is just too good.

Someone made an iPhone app and Android is under development.

I'm that someone, and it was written in a weekend on a jail broken iPod touch on iOS 3.2. So, its unlikely that it still works (and I wouldn't recommend using it even if you can get it to work). I long since switched (back) to lastpass due to the pain of managing ssh keys across multiple devices.

Why not use the built in git support for pass?

That's what I do, with a private BitBucket repo.

pass is great! I use it every day, only problem is that I haven't found an android client. Do you know if there exists one?

I use LastPass every day now. Everything about it makes sense (including git versioning for all your passwords). Thanks!

You mean "pass", not LastPass.

I love pass so much. Use it every single day on Cygwin. I remember getting it to work in Cygwin. Fun stuff.

I like to keep my passwords synced in Dropbox, and I usually work in *nix, but I occasionally have to access them in Windows, so I wrote a little batch file that uses gpg4win to read my passwords https://github.com/davidmi/ScriptsAndTools

Just want to chime in. Your pet project is the only password manager I have used longer than a week.

Using dmenu with StumpWM, I show people I have an OS level keychain that I can pop open and search with a keyboard binding. My IT brethren nod with approval.

just modified the pass dmenu script to work with lastpass

  #!/usr/bin/env bash

  shopt -s nullglob globstar

  typeit=0
  if [[ $1 == "--type" ]]; then
    typeit=1
    shift
  fi
  name=$(lpass ls | dmenu)
  id=$(echo $name | sed -r 's/.*\id:\s([0-9]+).*/\1/g')
  if [[ $typeit -eq 0 ]]; then
    lpass show -c --password $id
  else
    xdotool - <<<"type --clearmodifiers -- $(lpass show --password $id)"
  fi

I do not use last pass but that xdotool idea is very slick. I will definitely employ that idea.

I had no idea pass existed. I will have to check it out. Thanks!

Awesome, great pet project. As others have said, I use it daily and it's the only manager I've used for any time. I use it with a Yubikey Neo with a GPG subkey in it, and store my passwords in a Bitbucket repo that I can check out on any machine (using an RSA key also in my Yubikey via gpg-agent with enable-ssh-support). I've looked at using it for small teams as well by encrypting to multiple recipients. Excellent and elegantly unixy!

Very nice. Mind writing up a tutorial for that setup? I'm sure it will help others.

Sure it would help me and my team.

I've been working on some bash scripts that borrow your "pass" interface but works with OS X's Keychain, so thanks very much for doing the hard parts for me!

Your pet is probably the best password manager around. I use it daily and love it!

Thanks for your work, seriously, this is one kickass pet project if I ever saw one.

Something like this, but for the team would be so awesome… Edit: looks like this tool supports multiple keys. Does that mean that passwords can be shared?

Yes -- pass has extensive support for being used by teams. You can set various levels of ACLs by having different combinations of keys for different directories.

I like Pass. But ..

I've got a task to setup a password manager for a team, all of whom are Windows users.

But my focus isn't personal passwords for email, or google, but the eleventy-dozen passwords that accumulate around any IT department: root for this, and that, the firewall, database, CHAP .. the list is endless.

Is there a 'windows like' pass? Is there a

Pass works very well with teams, as it supports various levels of key combinations.

It also will run well under Cygwin on Windows.

I'll give Cygwin another try. I like it.

My guys aren't going to want to know about all that just 'click some buttons and get passwords'.

After some thought, my Windows guys will rebel if I have them use Cygwin.

But I bet one can run Cygwin in a Windows Docker.

For those who thought if this was legit and genuine or a smart phishing attempt, it is legit: http://blog.lastpass.com/2014/10/open-sourced-lastpass-comma...

As a premium subscriber, this is great. I had to weaken my github password 3 months ago because I started rolling VMs every other day and I had set random characters as my password. This means I can restrengthen it this weekend

Why not use keys?

Hopefully he means key passwords?...

I just made a homebrew formula for this and sent in a PR

https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/pull/33487

beat me to it although i made a tap instead. but unless i'm mistaken you don't need openssl or libxml2 since osx provides those.

Someone beat me to it too

https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/pull/33486

LOL

The first thing I thought after seeing this trending on HN this morning was "damn, maybe I'll finally have an opportunity to submit a formula to Homebrew!".

wow that's awesome! We really appreciate that.

I really appreciate your service. Having it in the command line will save me a ton of time

Dubious initial FreeBSD port: https://github.com/Freaky/lastpass-cli

Don't use the edit command on anything sensitive without a suitably secured /tmp - ideally tmpfs and encrypted swap - since it writes the data to a tempfile for your editor to open.

Probably a little late to the party but I made it into a Debian package: https://github.com/lastpass/lastpass-cli/pull/26. I did upload the packages here: https://launchpad.net/~ridgebit/+archive/ubuntu/ppa. However, it'd be better if someone from the team actually put this into their own repo, as I have nothing to do with the project, and thus cannot be trusted :)

This is great. Only question is, how can they justify charging $12/yr for mobile/Premium access when anyone can write a full featured iOS/Android app using this code as a template? All the right endpoints are there, 2FA support, local encryption code etc.

I know that their API was reverse engineered a million times already, but this just seems like they are explicitly enabling copycat apps.

There's presumably a pretty strong lock-in effect where I might trust Lastpass, but I wouldn't trust some random app author with literally all my passwords no matter what assurances the app download page provides.

For me, the reverse is true.

I would rather trust an app running locally behind my firewall than I would trust lastpass. If the app tries to sneak a copy of my passwords out of the network its going to have to find a way through the outbound firewall first. I have no such protection when using last pass.

$12/year. $12. Twelve. Dollars.

I am a premium subscriber and happy to see this.

Building fails on Mavericks with the 10.10 sdk

    awk 'BEGIN {printf "#define CERTIFICATE_THAWTE \""} {printf "%s\\n", $0} END {printf "\"\n"}' thawte.pem > certificate.h || rm -f certificate.h
    awk: syntax error at source line 1
     context is
    	 >>> BEGIN <<<  {printf "#define CERTIFICATE_THAWTE \""}    {printf "%s\\n", $0} END {printf "\"\n"}
    awk: bailing out at source line 1
    cc -O3 -march=native -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe -std=gnu99 -D_GNU_SOURCE -pedantic -Wall -Wextra -Wno-language-extension-token -MMD -Wno-deprecated-declarations -isysroot /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.10.sdk -I/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents   /Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.10.sdk/usr/include/libxml2   -c -o http.o http.c

http.c:10:10: fatal error: 'certificate.h' file not found #include "certificate.h"

I got a build working on OS X (mountain_lion, mavericks, yosemite) using homebrew, see PR here: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/pull/33486/files

Sweet, built fine with that. Oddly I already had all the depends installs, so not sure why the included make doesn't work. Thanks!

Just a PSA for mac users: Keychain Access.app has a command line interface: `security` . I use a special keychain for some of my TrueCrypt passwords, so I can mount them all with the same password via the command line via `security find-generic-password`

Any ideas if CLI also supports login with a Yubikey device?

LastPass has Yubikey support for the Premium tier.

There's code for it at least. Can't verify if it works right now due to problems building on FreeBSD.

Just got it working - Yubikey support seems fine.

Does LastPass work with IE enhanced protected mode yet?

Cool but when's the PowerShell module coming out?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com