main.ts asserted the recipient non-null twice — extractAgePublicKey(...)!
— and the type already said null was possible. With no age.key the vault
encrypted to the string "null": execa stringifies it, age exits 1, and on
the generate path that happens *after* ssh-keygen has written a plaintext
private key into tmpDir, so the user is told the operation failed and left
with a key on disk. Now the recipient is resolved once, remembered on
success, and a null prints the remedy (age-keygen -o <path>) and returns
to the menu. list, copy and decrypt still work without one.
extractAgePublicKey now derives the public key with `age-keygen -y`
instead of scraping the `# public key:` comment. The comment is ordinary
text nothing re-checks; verified that rewriting it does not change what
-y reports, so a stale or forged comment silently encrypted the vault to
a recipient nobody holds the private half of.
The comment survives as a fallback for a machine with no age-keygen,
behind a warning that it is unverified — but not when age-keygen runs and
refuses the file. That means age cannot read the identity, and trusting
the comment there would encrypt to a recipient the vault could never
decrypt with.
runTool throws ToolNotFoundError for ENOENT so the two cases can be told
apart. Its own tests move to tool.test.ts, which keeps real processes;
utils.test.ts mocks execa, since the gate cannot require age installed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Benjamin Diedrichsen