gnome-keyring with Python

by Sebastian Rittau July 26, 2007

programming gnome python

The documentation on gnome-keyring I discovered helped me to access it successfully with Python. I've written a small module that fetches and stores a username and a password for some server.

Some notes:

The attributes are freeform, but there a some common attributes for network hosts. These are: "user", "domain", "server", "object", "protocol", "authtype", and "port". Actually there is a convenience API for network hosts.
libgnome-keyring requires that the application is correctly set using g_set_application_name. Unfortunately the Python module gnomekeyring does not do that for us and pygtk does not provide a function to set the application name. Therefore you need to include the module gtk to make it work. (Filed as bug 460515.)

Update: g_set_application_name was added to pygtk in the 2.13 development version.
Python's find_network_password_sync function does not allow None to be passed as arguments. The C API allows NULL to be passed here. This means that this function is basically unusable in Python, since you never want to provide all values. (Filed as bug 460518.)

could you provide a license for the module
by 0x89
Wednesday, 25 November 2009 23:47

I know it is not big, but as you are the no 1 hit for "python gnome keyring" on google, could you provide a license for your module? If not specified, the module cannot be used in any open source tools.

License
by Sebastian Rittau
Thursday, 26 November 2009 09:53

Consider this module to be in the Public Domain. (I'd probably have a hard time to claim any rights under German Copyright law for something trivial as this in any case ...)

NoMatchError by David
Monday, 4 January 2010 05:59

has_credentials() was failing for me with a NoMatchError so I added:
except gkey.NoMatchError:
return False

I'm using python 2.6.4 on Ubuntu 9.10.

I'm not sure the DeniedError should ever happen. As far as I can see it should only happen if you've already got the same entry but added by a different application and in that case I don't think you actually want to return false, I think you want to pass the error up the function stack.