Many pro­grams re­quire pass­words from the us­er.

It's nice when a pro­gram can re­mem­ber the pass­word you give it.

It's nicer when it stores said pass­word safe­ly. How­ev­er, it's not triv­ial to do that if you care for cross-­plat­form sup­port.

Or at least it was­n't un­til Kang Zhang wrote python keyring, a mod­ule that ab­stracts the pass­word stor­age mech­a­nisms for KDE, GNOME, OSX and win­dows (and adds a cou­ple of file-based back­ends just in case).

So, how does it work?

In­stall it in the usu­al way. If it's not pack­aged for your dis­tro/­op­er­at­ing sys­tem, just use easy_in­stal­l:

easy_install keyring

You could al­so get it from mer­cu­ri­al:

hg clone http://bitbucket.org/kang/python-keyring-lib/

The API is sim­plic­i­ty it­self. This is how you save a se­cret:

import keyring
keyring.set_password('keyring_demo','username','thisisabadpassword')

You may get this di­a­log (or some ana­log on oth­er plat­form­s):

And here's the proof that it was saved cor­rect­ly (this is KDE's pass­word man­ager):

And how do you get the se­cret back?

import keyring
print keyring.get_password('keyring_demo','username')

This is how it run­s:

$ python load.py
thisisabadpassword

As you can see, the API is as easy as it could pos­si­ble get. It even chose the KWal­let back­end au­to­mat­i­cal­ly be­cause I am in KDE!

Python-keyring is a mod­ule that fix­es a big prob­lem, so a big thank you to Kang Zhang and Tarek Zi­adé (who had the idea)