Cannot set passphrase through environment variable

Support
1

I made a backup using duplicati-cli (version 2.0.6.3_beta_2021-06-17), with a passphrase set using the --passphrase argument.

I’m now trying to supply it through the environment variable PASSPHRASE, but it seems to be ignored, as I get this error:

ErrorID: PassphraseChangeNotSupported
You have attempted to change a passphrase to an existing backup, which is not supported. Please configure a new clean backup if you want to change the passphrase.

I tried in both this way, but the result is the same:

export PASSPHRASE="my_passphrase"
duplicati-cli [...]

PASSPHRASE="my_passphrase"; duplicati-cli [...]

Am I doing something wrong, or is there a problem?

2

I’m guessing this is a bash script? Do you have any special characters in your password that bash may be interpreting/processing? (Like a $ for example.) If so you might need to escape those characters.

3

Yes, this is a bash script. I don’t have special characters in the passphrase, I only have alphanumeric characters [A-Za-z0-9].

4

So you are doing something like this in the duplicati-cli part of your command?

PASSPHRASE="my_passphrase"; duplicati-cli ... --passphrase=$PASSPHRASE ...

I wonder if it really wants quotes around it. You might need to escape the quotes for bash to keep them, eg:

PASSPHRASE=\"my_passphrase\"; duplicati-cli ... --passphrase=$PASSPHRASE ...
5

No, I’m not using the --passphrase argument, I’m just setting the PASSPHRASE variable.

According to the docs:

Supply a passphrase that Duplicati will use to encrypt the backup volumes, making them unreadable without the passphrase. This variable can also be supplied through the environment variable PASSPHRASE .

6

Interesting, I didn’t know about that option!

I tested it out and it works for me. I exported one of my web UI jobs as command line and removed the --passphrase=xxxx part. Then I did export PASSPHRASE="xxx" and ran the command and it worked as expected:

Capture
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Replacing mono /usr/lib/duplicati/Duplicati.CommandLine.exe with duplicati-cli made no difference, both worked.

7

I’m confused. Was the error there without that? If not, the addition was not ignored.
Of course, you’d also like it to do what you want. Maybe it’s time to test decryption:

mono /usr/lib/duplicati/SharpAESCrypt.exe d <passphrase> <full-path-to-aes-file> > /dev/null

Was it an Export As Command-line from a GUI job, or completely hand-built (harder to do right)?

8

I figured out what my problem was; nothing wrong with duplicati, the problem is that I was running duplicates with sudo, and thus the environment variable was not being passed. I therefore had to use sudo -E duplicati-cli [...].

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