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Grant access to system's keychain (Linux)

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Virgile edited this page Apr 17, 2024 · 8 revisions

How to solve "Wire could not access your system safe storage" on Linux

With the introduction of Electron's safeStorage, the Wire app now requires access to your system's keychain.

This should happen transparently, but we identified an issue with the community maintained Snap package, and with users that do not use a full desktop environment (usually users who prefer a tiling window manager).

If you are using the Snap package:

  • There is currently no workaround as we do not maintain that package, we have identified a potential fix and contacted the maintainer, you can follow the progress here, we recommend using the app in a browser in the mean time.

If you are not using a full desktop environment:

  • Install one of the supported keychain on your system
  • Start the Wire app with a flag to grant Electron access to the library

Install a supported keychain

Electron supports either the Gnome or KDE keychain to store information, you would need to install either a version of gnome-libsecret or kwallet on your system, the process differs depending on distribution, we will provide examples for Debian/libsecret and Arch/kwallet5

  • getting libsecret on a Debian based distribution:
sudo apt install libsecret-tools
  • getting kwallet5 on an Arch based distribution:
sudo pacman -S kwallet5

Launch Wire with the --password-store flag:

If chromium does not find a supported desktop environment, you will need to start the app with the relevant flag, list here

  • Launching the app on Debian/libsecret:
wire-desktop --password-store="gnome-libsecret"
  • Launching the app on Arch/kwallet5:
wire-desktop --password-store="kwallet5"

If you want to avoid adding that flag every time you could add it to your .desktop file:

  • Find your .desktop file, the name and location varies wildly between different distributions/packages
  • As an example we'll use the AppImage, the location should be `~/.local/share/applications/appimagekit-wire-desktop.desktop
  • Open the file in a text editor and add the flag in the Exec= line, in the AppImage example, it would be:
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Wire
Exec=/path/to/appimage/Wire-3.35.3348_x86_64.AppImage --password-store="gnome-libsecret" %U 
...
  • You only need to add your correct --password-store flag between the path to Wire's executable and "%U" and then save
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