PATATT(5)

📦
version 0.8.0 · 8 versions
, in arch rolling

💖 PATATT(5) — NAME 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the PATATT(5) manual page ✨ — the tool for DKIM-like cryptographic patch attestation. Think of it as signing your email patches with fancy cryptographic headers instead of the whole inline/detached PGP signature situation 💅.

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

patatt {sign,validate,genkey,install-hook} [options]

💅 DESCRIPTION 💅

so this tool lets you cryptographically sign patches sent via email by using DKIM-like message headers. It’s effective, and — key point — it doesn’t interfere with other code review tools the way inline or detached PGP signatures do. no cap, that’s the whole vibe 🦋.

For the full overview of core concepts and considerations, please see the README ✨.

If you already have a PGP key configured for signing git tags or commits, then you should be able to use patatt without any additional configuration. Try running this in any git repository:

git format-patch -1 --stdout | patatt sign

If patatt is not finding your PGP key, try adding this to your ~/.gitconfig:

[user]
    signingkey = [yourkeyid]

To find out your keyid, run gpg --list-secret-keys. If you want to use a specific subkey, you can specify the subkey ID with a ! at the end 🙈.

🧚 USING AS A GIT HOOK 🧚

If you use git-send-email for sending patches, then you can get them automatically signed via the sendemail-validate hook. To install, run this command in the repository you want enabled for signing:

$ patatt install-hook

Or you can install it manually:

$ echo 'patatt sign --hook "${1}"' >> .git/hooks/sendemail-validate
$ chmod a+x .git/hooks/sendemail-validate

🎀 SUBCOMMANDS 🎀

  • sign — sign stdin or RFC2822 files passed as arguments
  • validate — basic validation for signed messages
  • genkey — generate a new ed25519 keypair
  • install-hook — install sendemail-validate hook in the current repository

You can run patatt [subcommand] --help to see a summary of flags for each subcommand 👑

🫶 SUPPORT 🫶

Please email tools@kernel.org with support requests 💌.

👑 AUTHOR 👑

mricon@kernel.org

License: MIT-0

The Linux Foundation and contributors

💖 cute little sign-off bestie 💖: this page is from PATATT(5), version 0.8.0, dated 2026-07-22 — slay and goodbye ✨🎀

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