My window manager of choice is the awesome window manager. On my private laptop I have it setup together with the display manager SLiM and a custom .xinitrc which starts a few helpers like the gnome-keyring-daemon.

On my work laptop I have Ubuntu 16.04 installed. Ubuntu uses LightDM (The Light Display Manager) to manage logins. After installing awesome with sudo apt install awesome LightDM will allow you to start an awesome session. This is due to the /usr/share/xsessions/awesome.desktop file contained in the awesome package.

Unfortunately this starts awesome directly and does not execute the ~/.xinitrc file. But it does load the various /etc/X11/Xsession.d/ files which will then load the ~/.xsessionrc file if it exists. When .xsessionrc gets loaded it will pass the session to be started as the first argument ($1). So to start any helpers we create it with the following content:

#!/bin/sh
#
# ~/.xsessionrc
#

case $1 in
awesome)
    export $(gnome-keyring-daemon -s -c pkcs11,secrets,ssh,gpg)
    ;;
esac

This starts the gnome-keyring-daemon and export the SSH_AUTH_SOCK variable, but only if we are trying to start an awesome session.