pywin32
This is the readme for the Python for Win32 (pywin32) extensions, which provides access to many of the Windows APIs from Python.
See CHANGES.txt for recent notable changes.
Note that as of build 222, pywin32 has a new home at github. You can find build 221 and later on github and older versions can be found on the old project home at sourceforge
A special shout-out to @xoviat who provided enormous help with the github move!
Binaries
By far the easiest way to use pywin32 is to grab binaries from the most recent release
Feel free to open issues or pull-requests
Installing via PIP
Note that PIP support is experimental.
You can install pywin32 via pip:
pip install pywin32
However, you almost certainly need to execute:
python Scripts/pywin32_postinstall.py -install
after installation, or you will see various ImportErrors importing core modules.
Note that if you want to use pywin32 for "system wide" features, such as COM objects or Windows Services, then you must run the above command from an elevated command prompt.
Building from source
Building from source is extremely complicated due to the fact we support building
old versions of Python using old versions of Windows SDKs. If you just want to
build the most recent version, you can probably get away with installing th
same MSVC version used to build that version of Python, grabbing a recent
Windows SDK, setting the MSSDK environment variable to point at the root of
the SDK, and running setup.py (or setup3.py for Python 3.x versions)
setup.py is a standard distutils build script. You probably want:
python setup.py install
or
python setup.py --help
You can run setup.py without any arguments to see
specific information about dependencies. A vanilla MSVC installation should
be able to build most extensions and list any extensions that could not be
built due to missing libraries - if the build actually fails with your
configuration, please open an issue.