Updated on September 8th, 2020 in #dev-environment

Generate a Random Secure Password on the Command Line with pwgen

In this video, we'll go over how to generate a password of custom length with at least 1 uppercase / special char and 1 number.

Quick Jump: Demo Video of Using the pwgen Tool

I have over 300 passwords saved in the pass command line tool and I recently started generating random passwords for them. I’m finding this to be a lot faster than manually coming up with long word based passwords.

Demo Video of Using the pwgen Tool

Command

pwgen -sync 48 -1

I’ve also set up a pw alias to quickly generate passwords and copy them to your clipboard.

Timestamps

• 0:22 – Running the pwgen command without arguments
• 0:47 – Generating a password with a custom length
• 1:34 – Ensuring passwords have at least 1 uppercase char / special char / number
• 3:45 – Generating a few passwords to see how it works
• 4:27 – Creating a custom alias to make it easier to generate passwords
• 4:47 – Using the pw alias to generate passwords and copy it to your clipboard
• 5:21 – A common work flow of generating a pw and using it
• 6:18 – Why I don’t use tools like openssl to generate passwords

Reference Links

• https://linux.die.net/man/1/pwgen
• https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles

What tool do you use to generate random passwords? Let me know below.