DIRMNGR-CLIENT(1)

🎀 NAME 🎀

okay so bestie, this is dirmngr-client(1) — the tool to access the Dirmngr services 💖. It comes from the GNU Privacy Guard 2.6 world, and its whole main-character job is checking whether a certificate has been revoked: either because it’s listed in the corresponding CRL, or because it ran the OCSP protocol and got an answer. If no dirmngr is running, a new instance will be started — but ngl, the original page says this is in general not a good idea because of the huge performance overhead 😭.

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

dirmngr-client [options] [certfile|pattern]

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

dirmngr-client is a simple little tool that contacts a running dirmngr and tests whether a certificate has been revoked — either by being listed in the corresponding CRL or by running the OCSP protocol. If no dirmngr is running, a new instance will be started, but this is in general not a good idea due to the huge performance overhead. 🫶

The usual way to run this tool is either:

dirmngr-client acert

or

dirmngr-client <acert

where acert is one DER encoded (binary) X.509 certificate to be tested. 🧚

💅 RETURN VALUE 💅

dirmngr-client returns these values:

• 0 — The certificate under question is valid; i.e., there is a valid CRL available and it is not listed there, or the OCSP request returned that that certificate is valid. ✅
• 1 — The certificate has been revoked. 💀
• 2 (and other values) — There was a problem checking the revocation state of the certificate. A message to stderr has given more detailed information. Most likely this is due to a missing or expired CRL or due to a network problem. 😭

🦋 OPTIONS 🦋

dirmngr-client may be called with the following options:

• --version — Print the program version and licensing information. Note that you cannot abbreviate this command.
• --help, -h — Print a usage message summarizing the most useful command-line options. Note that you cannot abbreviate this command.
• --quiet, -q — Make the output extra brief by suppressing any informational messages.
• -v — the short -v flag is listed here on its own; the --verbose entry right below has the description.
• --verbose — Outputs additional information while running. You can increase the verbosity by giving several verbose commands to dirmngr, such as -vv.
• --pem — Assume that the given certificate is in PEM (armored) format.
• --ocsp — Do the check using the OCSP protocol and ignore any CRLs.
• --force-default-responder — When checking using the OCSP protocol, force the use of the default OCSP responder. That is not to use the Responder as given by the certificate.
• --ping — Check whether the dirmngr daemon is up and running.
• --cache-cert — Put the given certificate into the cache of a running dirmngr. This is mainly useful for debugging.
• --validate — Validate the given certificate using dirmngr's internal validation code. This is mainly useful for debugging.
• --load-crl — This command expects a list of filenames with DER encoded CRL files. With the option --url URLs are expected in place of filenames and they are loaded directly from the given location. All CRLs will be validated and then loaded into dirmngr's cache.
• --lookup — Take the remaining arguments and run a lookup command on each of them. The results are Base-64 encoded outputs (without header lines). This may be used to retrieve certificates from a server. However the output format is not very well suited if more than one certificate is returned.
• --url, -u — Modify the lookup and load-crl commands to take an URL.
• --local, -l — Let the lookup command only search the local cache.
• --squid-mode — Run dirmngr-client in a mode suitable as a helper program for Squid's external_acl_type option.

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

dirmngr(8), gpgsm(1)

The full documentation for this tool is maintained as a Texinfo manual. If GnuPG and the info program are properly installed at your site, the command

info gnupg

should give you access to the complete manual including a menu structure and an index. 👑

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