Adding missing GPG keys for apt-get on WSL

TL;DR: Retrieve the keys manually using:

curl -sL “https://keyserver.ubuntu.com/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xKEY_HASH_GOES_HERE" | sudo apt-key add

Recently, I’ve stumbled upon an issue where some GPG keys were not available. Usually the solution to that is to directly use apt-key to retrieve those keys.

For example:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 112695A0E562B32A

Unfortunately (at least on my version of WSL), there seems to be an issue with it; the command fails with:

...
gpg: connecting dirmngr at ‘/tmp/apt-key-gpghome.H755AH9Xn5/S.dirmngr’ failed: IPC connect call failed
gpg: keyserver receive failed: No dirmngr

Obviously, installing dirmngr should fix it but it doesn’t work once installed.

Since I don’t really have time to get into this further (I’m pretty sure that there are known solutions to this under WSL: https://github.com/sbt/sbt/issues/4261), I looked for alternatives.

I found the following:

curl -sL “https://keyserver.ubuntu.com/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xKEY_HASH_GOES_HERE" | sudo apt-key add

Basically we’re just downloading the key ourselves using curl and passing it to apt-key so that it can add it.

Time to get back to what I was trying to do in the first place.. What was it already? ;-)