hexablog

NO_PUBKEY when running sudo apt-get update

Posted on Dec 16, 2022

I’ve tried a lot of solutions on the internet, but none of them worked for me. So I’m writing this post to help others who are having the same problem. Btw, this is my first post!

What did I do?

I wanted to update my Ubuntu 18.04 droplet on DigitalOcean, so I ran sudo apt-get update and the result I got was:

root@ubuntu:~# sudo apt-get update
Hit:1 https://repos.insights.digitalocean.com/apt/do-agent main InRelease
Get:2 http://mirrors.digitalocean.com/ubuntu bionic InRelease [242 kB]
Get:3 https://cli.github.com/packages stable InRelease [3917 B]
Hit:4 https://deb.nodesource.com/node_12.x bionic InRelease
Get:5 http://mirrors.digitalocean.com/ubuntu bionic-updates InRelease [88.7 kB]
Get:6 http://mirrors.digitalocean.com/ubuntu bionic-backports InRelease [83.3 kB]
Err:3 https://cli.github.com/packages stable InRelease
The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 23F3D4EA75716059
Get:7 https://repos-droplet.digitalocean.com/apt/droplet-agent main InRelease [5518 B]
Hit:8 http://ppa.launchpad.net/deadsnakes/ppa/ubuntu bionic InRelease
Get:9 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-security InRelease [88.7 kB]
Hit:10 http://ppa.launchpad.net/linuxuprising/java/ubuntu bionic InRelease
Err:7 https://repos-droplet.digitalocean.com/apt/droplet-agent main InRelease
The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 35696F43FC7DB4C2
Get:11 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-security/universe amd64 Packages [1250 kB]
Get:12 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-security/universe Translation-en [289 kB]
Fetched 2048 kB in 2s (1122 kB/s)
Reading package lists... Done
W: An error occurred during the signature verification. The repository is not updated and the previous index files will be used. GPG error: https://cli.github.com/packages stable InRelease: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 23F3D4EA75716059
W: An error occurred during the signature verification. The repository is not updated and the previous index files will be used. GPG error: https://repos-droplet.digitalocean.com/apt/droplet-agent main InRelease: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 35696F43FC7DB4C2
W: Failed to fetch https://repos-droplet.digitalocean.com/apt/droplet-agent/dists/main/InRelease The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 35696F43FC7DB4C2
W: Failed to fetch https://cli.github.com/packages/dists/stable/InRelease The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 23F3D4EA75716059
W: Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.

What’s the problem?

In the above output, I got NO_PUBKEY 23F3D4EA75716059 and NO_PUBKEY 35696F43FC7DB4C2 error. I searched for this error on the internet and found a lot of solutions, but none of them fixed this problem.

⭐ The solution

I found the solution on this StackExchange post. The solution is to run the following commands:

curl -fsSL https://cli.github.com/packages/githubcli-archive-keyring.gpg | sudo dd of=/usr/share/keyrings/githubcli-archive-keyring.gpg \
&& sudo chmod go+r /usr/share/keyrings/githubcli-archive-keyring.gpg \
&& echo "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/githubcli-archive-keyring.gpg] https://cli.github.com/packages stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/github-cli.list > /dev/null \
&& sudo apt update \
&& sudo apt install gh -y

This will fix the NO_PUBKEY 23F3D4EA75716059 error, but I still saw the NO_PUBKEY 35696F43FC7DB4C2 error.

To fix this error, I needed to run the following command:

wget -qO- https://repos-droplet.digitalocean.com/install.sh | sudo bash

and this should fix the NO_PUBKEY 35696F43FC7DB4C2 error.

Result

Now you can run sudo apt-get update and it should work like this:

root@ubuntu:~# sudo apt-get update
Hit:1 https://cli.github.com/packages stable InRelease
Hit:2 https://repos.insights.digitalocean.com/apt/do-agent main InRelease
Get:3 http://mirrors.digitalocean.com/ubuntu bionic InRelease [242 kB]
Hit:4 https://deb.nodesource.com/node_12.x bionic InRelease
Hit:5 https://repos-droplet.digitalocean.com/apt/droplet-agent main InRelease
Hit:6 http://mirrors.digitalocean.com/ubuntu bionic-updates InRelease
Hit:7 http://mirrors.digitalocean.com/ubuntu bionic-backports InRelease
Hit:8 http://ppa.launchpad.net/deadsnakes/ppa/ubuntu bionic InRelease
Hit:9 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-security InRelease
Hit:10 http://ppa.launchpad.net/linuxuprising/java/ubuntu bionic InRelease
Fetched 242 kB in 1s (293 kB/s)
Reading package lists... Done