Unlock Gnome Keyring with Auto Login

Mar 28, 2025

I’ve been running Arch for several months now. It’s been great, I haven’t really noticed to be honest. In fact, it’s basically just like being on Fedora, except with no major version upgrdes and a faster package manager. The only thing I really noticed that’s different is this dreaded pop up…

Since my computers are single user, I tend to enable auto login and just use my LUKS password to unlock the computer. This worked very well on Fedora, but on Arch Gnome keyring doesn’t seem to unlock. So, instead of spending 2 minutes amortized over the course of a year typing in my password. I decided to spend two days researching how to fix this.

The solution is actually pretty simple. Systemd already supports forwarding the crypt password to Gnome keyring. All you need to do is use systemd based init by tweaking some mkinitcpio hooks. The mkinitcpio file is actually really well documented, and kind of explains everything. Here is what I ended up with:

# /ect/mkinitcpio.conf
...
HOOKS=(systemd autodetect microcode modconf kms keyboard sd-vconsole sd-encrpt block fielsystems fsck)
...

Then regenerate your initramfs with mkinitcpio -P. The last thing to tweak is your kernel parameters. Systemd uses slightly different parameters from the udev based init. Here is my systemd-boot loader entry:

# /boot/loader/entries/arch.conf
title Arch Linux
linux /vmlinuz-linux
initrd /initramfs-linux.img
options rd.luks.name=<Your UUID here>=root rd.luks.options=discard root=/dev/mapper/root rw quiet splash zswap.enabled=0

You can check the UUID of your device by running lsblk -f. You’ll want the toplevel partition where your root is located named something like crypto_LUKS

And that’s it! Now it should all “Just Work”