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!

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

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 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.