PyUSB – Easy USB access for Python

Introduction

PyUSB provides for easy access to the host machine's Universal Serial Bus (USB) system for Python 3.

Until 0.4 version, PyUSB used to be a thin wrapper over libusb. Starting with the 1.0 version, things changed considerably: now PyUSB is an API rich, backend neutral Python USB module easy to use.

Documentation

The best way to get started with PyUSB is to read the following documents:

Tutorial
FAQ

For more detailed information, PyUSB's API documentation, as with most Python modules, is based on Python doc strings and can be manipulated by tools such as pydoc [1]:

$ python -m pydoc usb

The libusb 1.0 documentation is also a recommended read, especially when using that backend (more on this bellow).

Requirements and platform support

PyUSB is primarily developed and tested on Linux and Windows, but it should also work fine on any platform running Python >= 3.7, ctypes and at least one of the built-in backends.

PyUSB supports libusb 1.0, libusb 0.1 and OpenUSB. Of those, libusb 1.0 is currently recommended for most use cases.

On Linux and BSD, these will generally be available on the distribution's official repositories.

On macOS, libusb 1.0 can easily be installed through Homebrew:

$ brew install libusb

On Windows, pyocd/libusb-package is a convenient [2] [3] way to provide the necessary libusb 1.0 DLL, as well as a suitable PyUSB backend and a easy to use wrapper over PyUSB's find() API:

# with pure PyUSB
for dev in usb.core.find(find_all=True):
    print(dev)

# with pyocd/libusb-package
for dev in libusb_package.find(find_all=True):
    print(dev)

Alternatively, the libusb 1.0 DLL can be manually copied from an official release archive into the C:\Windows\System32 system folder, or packaged together with the complete application.

Installing

PyUSB is generally installed through pip [1]:

# the latest official release
python -m pip install pyusb

# install a specific version (e.g. 1.2.1)
python -m pip install pyusb==1.2.1

# the latest snapshop from the official git repository
python -m pip install pyusb git+https://github.com/pyusb/pyusb#egg=pyusb

Most Linux distributions also package PyUSB in their official repositories.

Getting help

If you have a question about PyUSB:

consult the FAQ;
post a question in the Q&A section;
write to the PyUSB mailing list.

To report a bug or propose a new feature, use our issue tracker. But please search the database before opening a new issue.

Footnotes

[1]	(1, 2) On systems that still default to Python 2, replace `python` with `python3`.

[2]	Unlike PyUSB, pyocd/libusb-package uses the more restrictive Apache 2.0 license.

[3]	While pyocd/libusb-package supports platforms other than Windows, there are advantages to sticking to a system-provided libusb, if it is available and the platform has a robust package manager (e.g. Linux, BSD, macOS with Homebrew).