Jakub Klapacz jklapacz

Exporting (iCloud) Keychain and Safari credentials to a CSV file

After my dad died, I wanted to be able to have access any of his online accounts going forward. My dad was a Safari user and used iCloud Keychain to sync his credentials across his devices. I don’t want to have to keep an OS X user account around just to access his accounts, so I wanted to export his credentials to a portable file.

This is the process I used to create a CSV file of his credentials in the format “example.com,user,pass”. This portable format would be pretty easy to import into 1Password or Safari in the future.

The way I went about this isn’t great; it opens up more opportunities for apps to control one’s Mac through Accessibility APIs, it writes plaintext passwords to disk, and it could use some cleaning up. A better approach might leverage the security command line tool that ships with OS X. That said, I found this method to be a fun illustration of what’s possible us

Since macOS Catalina, the root drive is read-only. The solution is to create a separate APFS volume and a “synthetic” /nix directory which points to it:

# Check if /nix exists, if not:
echo 'nix' | sudo tee -a /etc/synthetic.conf
# this will create a "synthetic" empty directory /nix

# REBOOT so macOS sees the synthetic directory

# After rebooting, create an APFS volume for Nix

Nix on macOS Catalina

I'm writing this gist for my own records but it might help someone else too.

Installing Nix

Support for Catalina has improved a lot since the update was first rolled out.

Note: See the NixOS manual for discussion of the --darwin-use-unencrypted-nix-store-volume option.