PyWinpty: Pseudoterminals for Windows in Python

Copyright © 2017– Spyder Project Contributors

Overview

PyWinpty allows creating and communicating with Windows processes that receive input and print outputs via console input and output pipes. PyWinpty supports both the native ConPTY interface and the previous, fallback winpty library.

Dependencies

To compile pywinpty sources, you must have Rust and MSVC installed. Optionally, you can also have Winpty's C header and library files available on your include path.

Installation

You can install this library by using conda or pip package managers, as it follows:

Using conda (Recommended):

conda install pywinpty

Using pip:

pip install pywinpty

Building from source

To build from sources, you will require both a working stable or nightly Rust toolchain with target x86_64-pc-windows-msvc, which can be installed using rustup. Additionally, you will require a working installation of Microsoft Visual Studio C/C++ compiler.

Optionally, this library can be linked against winpty library, which you can install using conda-forge:

conda install winpty -c conda-forge

If you don't want to use conda, you will need to have the winpty binaries and headers available on your PATH.

Finally, pywinpty uses Maturin as the build backend, which can be installed using pip:

pip install maturin

To test your compilation environment settings, you can build pywinpty sources locally, by executing:

maturin develop

This package depends on the following Rust crates:

• PyO3: Library used to produce Python bindings from Rust code.
• CXX: Call C++ libraries from Rust.
• Maturin: Build system to build and publish Rust-based Python packages.
• Windows: Rust for Windows.

Package usage

Pywinpty offers a single python wrapper around winpty library functions. This implies that using a single object (winpty.PTY) it is possible to access to all functionality, as it follows:

# High level usage using `spawn`
from winpty import PtyProcess

proc = PtyProcess.spawn('python')
proc.write('print("hello, world!")\r\n')
proc.write('exit()\r\n')
while proc.isalive():
	print(proc.readline())

# Low level usage using the raw `PTY` object
from winpty import PTY

# Start a new winpty-agent process of size (cols, rows)
cols, rows = 80, 25
process = PTY(cols, rows)

# Spawn a new console process, e.g., CMD
process.spawn(br'C:\windows\system32\cmd.exe')

# Read console output (Unicode)
process.read()

# Write input to console (Unicode)
process.write(b'Text')

# Resize console size
new_cols, new_rows = 90, 30
process.set_size(new_cols, new_rows)

# Know if the process is alive
alive = process.isalive()

# End winpty-agent process
del process

Running tests

We use pytest to run tests as it follows (after calling maturin develop), the test suite depends on pytest-lazy-fixture, which can be installed via pip:

pip install pytest pytest-lazy-fixture flaky

All the tests can be exceuted using the following command

python runtests.py

Changelog

Visit our CHANGELOG file to learn more about our new features and improvements.

Contribution guidelines

We follow PEP8 and PEP257 for pure python packages and Rust to compile extensions. We use MyPy type annotations for all functions and classes declared on this package. Feel free to send a PR or create an issue if you have any problem/question.

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