Adding a GPG Key Manually

I was trying to install MongoDB 3.0 in my production machine and in order to be able to do that via apt-get I needed to import the MongoDB GPG public key.

It went wrong. It went really wrong.

After a huge delay at

gpg: requesting key 7F0CEB10 from hkp server keyserver.ubuntu.com

I would get

gpg: keyserver timed out
gpg: keyserver receive failed: keyserver error

The first solutions I found on the internet for this problem were modifying other commands to look like mine. So I already had the “best command”.

After some more Googling I found that I could grab the key manually and add it without a request to a server.

So I tried and got the key.

Ran

sudo apt-key add 10gen-gpg-key.asc

And the shell told me

OK

That was it. I decided to post about this so that if you find yourself in a similar scenario (cannot get keys via the command line), you have an idea of how to solve the problem. It also serves as a future reference to me, as StackOverflow didn’t do it this time.