PostMortem — Generates Packets of Useful Information for Partners and Dependents to be Opened Upon Death
PostMortem works with Avendesora to produce packets of information for partners and dependents to help them carry on after your death or incapacitation. Primarily PostMortem queries Avendesora to produce an encrypted document that contains information about all of your essential accounts including security credentials such as usernames and passcodes. It also can include related pre-prepared documents such as the legal documents that establish and control your estate.
Your partners and dependents do not need PostMortem or Avendesora to access their documents, however they must be capable of using GPG and have a GPG encryption key. However, if they do use happen to use Avendesora, they can import the accounts you shared with them directly into Avendesora.
Please report all bugs and suggestions to postmortem@nurdletech.com
Getting Started
You download and install PostMortem with:
pip3 install --user postmortem
Once installed, you will need a configuration file. The file is: ~/.config/postmortem/config.nt and should contain the following fields.
- my gpg ids
A string that contains an identifier for your GPG key. This could be your email address or a GPG ID. The output files will be encrypted with this key as well as the keys of the intended recipients.
- sign with
A string that contains an identifier of the GPG key you wish to use when signing the generated archives. If not given, your archives are not signed. You will also need to specify avendesora gpg passphrase account so that your key can be unlocked.
- cc
One or more email addresses. When postmortem packets are sent, these are added to carbon copy list.
- salutation
The default sign-off salutation to be used at the end of postmortem packet emails. May be overridden in recipients for individual recipients.
- avendesora gpg passphrase account
The name of the account that holds the passphrase of the GPG signing key.
- avendesora gpg passphrase field
The name of the account field that holds the passphrase of the GPG signing key. If not given, it is assumed to be a passcode field.
- name template
A python format string that specifies how the packet directory should be named. It can include two named parameters, name and now. name is the name of a recipient and now is and Arrow time object.
- recipients
A dictionary of dictionary that contains preferences for each of the recipients.
- categories
The postmortem_recipients category or categories to associate with this recipient.
The recipients email address.
- gpg id
The recipients GPG identifier. If not give, the email is used.
- attach
A list of documents to attach for this recipient.
- networth
The networth identifier. If given a networth report for the given identifier is included, otherwise no networth report is included.
- salutation
The sign-off salutation to be used for this recipient.
- accounts
The expected number of accounts owned by this recipient (optional). A warning is issues if the number of accounts is specified and the number of accounts found differs from this number.
The configuration is a NestedText file. Here is an example config file:
my gpg ids: odin@norse-gods.com
sign with: @ my gpg ids
name template: {name}-{now:YYMMDD}
estate docs:
- ~/home/estate/trust.pdf
- ~/home/estate/will.pdf
- ~/home/estate/deed-valhalla.pdf
recipients:
frigg:
email: frigg@norse-gods.com
category: wife
attach: @ estate docs
networth: odin
thor:
email: thor@norse-gods.com
category: kids
attach: @ estate docs
loki:
email: loki@norse-gods.com
category: kids
attach: @ estate docs
Notice that estate docs was defined at the top level, but it is not
a PostMortem setting. It simply defines a value that will be interpolated into
a setting later. The interpolation is done by adding @ to the name of the
value. So for example, in the recipients attach is specified as @estate
docs. This causes the list of estate documents to be used as attachments.
The same thing is done in sign with, which interpolates my gpg ids.
Two encrypted files are created for each recipient, one is an encrypted text file that contains your account information, the other is an encrypted Avendesora account file. Both of these files contain the same information. Each recipient should have an email or gpg_id that is associated with a known GPG key. Each recipient should also belong to a category. Your Avendesora accounts are searched for a field named postmortem_recipients, which is a string or list. The account is included in the packet if the recipients category is contained in postmortem_recipients. attach is a list of files or directories that are also included in the packet. Finally, if networth is specified and is True, then a networth summary is also included. networth may also be a profile name for the networth command, in which case that profile is used. The networth command is available from GitHub.
Running PostMortem
You can generate a packet for a particular recipient using:
postmortem thor
This creates the encrypted file that contains the packet. The packet can be extracted with:
gpg -d -o thor-190101.tgz thor-190101.tgz.gpg
tar zxf thor-190101.tgz
or, in a single step using:
gpg -d -o - thor-190101.tgz.gpg | tar zxf -
You can have PostMortem send the packet directly using email if email is given in the configuration file using:
postmortem -s thor
Finally, if you do not specify a recipient, packets are created for all known recipients.
Importing Accounts into Avendesora
Once you have extracted the files from a packet you will see a file named avendesora_acounts.gpg. This is an Avendesora accounts file. If you use Avendesora you can import the accounts using these two steps:
Copy the file into your Avendesora accounts directory. You may rename the file, but keep the extension the same. For example:
mv avendesora_acounts.gpg ~/.config/avendesora/parents.gpg
Edit the Avendesora accounts file and add your new file to the accounts_files list:
vi ~/.config/avendesora/accounts_files
Once you have done this you may find that there are conflicting names or aliases for your Avendesora accounts. For example, if both you and your parents use Nordea bank, the name nordea might conflict. In this case you should adjust the names and aliases used in your newly imported accounts file. None of the secrets in the imported file are generated, and so changing the account names in this file will change the underlying secrets.
Releases
- Latest Development Version
- Version: 0.8.0Released: 2021-08-10
- 0.8 (2021-08-10)
Improve error reporting.
Allow each recipient to pull from multiple categories.
- 0.7 (2021-01-03)
Miscellaneous refinements.
- 0.6 (2020-10-14)
Improve sanity checking on settings.
Rename extras setting to attach.
- 0.5 (2020-10-12)
Switch to using NestedText for config file.
- 0.4 (2020-03-06)
Add README to repository.
Sign the archives, generate the unpack script.
- 0.3 (2019-04-28)
Add generation of avendesora_accounts.gpg file.
- 0.2 (2019-03-23)
Bug fixes.
- 0.0 (2019-01-31)
Initial version