HOWTO: Sort BitWarden Passwords by Date

I highly recommend BitWarden as a password manager. It is free, open source, and has a great range of apps and APIs.

The one thing it doesn't have is a way to sort your accounts by creation date. I now have over a thousand accounts that I've added - so I wanted to prune away some of the older ones.

So, here's how to do it.

Export your vault

In the desktop version of BitWarden, go to File → Export Vault. Choose the JSON format (this doesn't work for CSV) and follow the on-screen instructions.

NOTE! This will save all of your passwords to disk. Do not do this on a shared machine. Delete the file as soon as you are done with it.

Sort with JQ

Using the jq utility it is possible to search and sort the exported JSON.

This command pipes your export to JQ. It selects all the items, then it sorts by when the item was last edited. It then displays the name of the account and the date, followed by a newline.

cat bitwarden.json | jq -r '.items | sort_by(.revisionDate) | .[] | .name, .revisionDate, " " '

Purge!

You could use the API to delete items based on their ID. Personally, I'd rather go through manually.

What's next?

It would be great if BitWarden allowed sorting by date in their UI. Even better if they could sort by usage. Until then, I'll spend every Valentine's Day manually deleting old and unloved accounts.