GPGME 1.7 includes bindings for Python >= 2.7. The bindings are a port of the pyme bindings to Python 3 retaining compatibility with Python 2.7, with a small shim on top to provide a more idiomatic interface. For the purposes of this post I will refer to the preexisting bindings that are for Python 2 only pyme2, and to our new bindings as pyme3. Existing applications using pyme2 should continue to work no changes.

pyme2 offers an interface that is very close to that of GPGME. This interface exposes all features of the underlying library, but it is not very "pythonic". Therefore, we made an effort to provide a nicer interface on top of that. Let me demonstrate how that looks.

One important aspect is how to pass data around. GPGME uses gpgme_data_t for that, and in pyme2 one had to explicitly create pyme.core.Data objects to pass data to GPGME or to receive data. With pyme3 one can use every object that implements the buffer protocol (e.g. bytes), file-like objects with a fileno method, or explicit pyme.Data objects in places where GPGME expects a gpgme_data_t object:

import pyme
with pyme.Context(armor=True) as c:
    ciphertext, _, _ = c.encrypt(b"Hello Python world :)", passphrase="foo")

This will encrypt the given plaintext using symmetric encryption and the given passphrase, wrap it up using the OpenPGP protocol, and encode it using ASCII-armor. The plaintext is easily recovered using:

with pyme.Context() as c:
    plaintext, _, _ = c.decrypt(ciphertext, passphrase="foo")
assert plaintext == b"Hello Python world :)"

If passphrase is omitted, it is asked for out-of-band using GnuPG's pinentry mechanism. Alternatively, if one or more recipients are specified, asymmetric encryption is used. For details, please have a look at the docstring of pyme.Context.encrypt.

Most file-like objects can be used without explicit wrapping. This is a filter that decrypts OpenPGP messages in three lines of code:

import sys
import pyme
pyme.Context().decrypt(sys.stdin, sink=sys.stdout)

For more examples, have a look at the tests and examples shipped with the bindings under lang/python.

If you cannot wait until pyme3 is packaged by your distribution, and you do not want to build GPGME 1.7 from source merely to get pyme3, you can build it out-of-tree provided you have at least GPGME 1.6, the Python development packages, and SWIG. You can get it from pypi or directly install it using pip:

# As of this writing, there is no released version uploaded to pypi,
# hence we need --pre.
$ pip install --pre pyme3