How it works

Type passgen "some passphrase here" into the terminal or command prompt. Or you can just type passgen to be prompted for your passphrase keeping your passphrase out of your terminal history. PassGen takes your input string, appends a unique salt string to it, and then generates a hash. The resulting hash is then base91 encoded so that it uses all uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and standard symbols. A subset of 15-100 (default is 40 and can be changed in the setup) characters is picked from the base91 encoded hash and then placed in your clipboard to be pasted into a password field.

Every time you use the same input string, you will get the same result from PassGen. This allows you to use an easy to remember passphrases to generate lengthy, complicated passwords that no one can reproduce unless they know your passphrase, salt, and method of generating passwords.

Installation

1. Install NodeJS if you haven't already https://nodejs.org
2. If you're on Linux, make sure xclip is isntalled (sudo apt-get install xclip, or equivalent command for your distro)
3. Type npm install -g passgen-cli into your terminal or command window
4. Type passgen -s and hit enter to launch the setup process. If you haven't used passgen before a random salt will have been generated for you. Replace this salt with your own if you've already used passgen elsewhere.
5. Done. You can now generate passwords.

If you would like to add a prompt window for PassGen to OSX's Automator follow the instructions here.

Links to Dependencies

• Base91 https://github.com/mscdex/base91.js
• Skein hash https://github.com/drostie/sha3-js
• Minimist https://github.com/substack/minimist
• Prompt https://github.com/flatiron/prompt
• copy-paste https://github.com/xavi-/node-copy-paste
• fs-extra https://github.com/jprichardson/node-fs-extra