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.

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

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 the 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 to:

% setup.py install

or

% 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.