UPDATED see the end.

The Python standard library has a module called getpass you can use to get a password from the prompt:

>>> import getpass >>> password = getpass.getpass() Password: <-- non-echoed typing here >>> print password worked

That’s nice, and Distutils uses it to ask for your password when you register or upload a release at PyPI, if it’s not found in your pypirc file. But this is annoying to type and type again your password, so you end up saving it in clear text in pypirc. Thats sucks. And the getpass module gets pretty useless if you want to store and retrieve passwords from other places than the user brain.

But wait… we have the Keyring project now.. what about making getpass use Keyring so you can safely read a password from your favorite keyring (Keychain, KWallet, etc..) ?

I’ve started to write a new getpass module that could do this. But instead of adding a keyring dependency in it and struggling for months (years) to get the addition of Keyring into the stdlib, I have made getpass pluggable.

In my improved version, you can define in a small configuration file (getpass.cfg) an arbritrary function that will be used by getpass for the getpass.getpass API. Here’s such a file:

[getpass] getpass-backend = keyring:get_pass_get_password

Here I am configuring get pass to use the get_pass_get_password function from the keyring package. That’s a function that gets installed in your Python once Keyring is installed.

This function has the same interface than the default getpass.getpass API and calls keyring.

The modified getpass module is here: http://bitbucket.org/tarek/getpass/

And works against the current trunk of Keyring.

What I would like to do now is to propose the small changes I’ve made in Python’s getpass for inclusion in the stdlib. They are backward compatible changes and offers a simple, yet powerfull way to extend getpass without adding any other module in the stdlib. And maybe adding a setpass in there too would make sense.

Update from python-ideas

So I brought up the idea in the mailing lists and it turns out (thanks to the folks at Python-ideas) that the way I want to introduce this feature is not good for these reasons :

getpass is just a function that is used to get a password from the prompt. you can consider it as a potential, dummy backend for Keyring for example. Trying to make it extendable just denaturates its original purpose. the only use case right now in the stdlib is for Distutils, so it doesn’t really make sense to have a keyring in there. People can just use the Keyring project directly. Now if other parts of the stdlib have the same need, it will be time to think about how it could be included in the stdlib level rather than in Distutils.

So, I’ll work for its inclusion at Distutils level rather thah on getpass level.