What replaced Python's gnomekeyring module in Ubuntu 18.04/Bionic?

I have a large set of scripts which interact with Active Directory in a corporate/enterprise environment. Rather than have to type in my AD password on each run, I built a gnomekeyring store and lookup into each script.

Now that I've upgraded to Ubuntu 18.04, all of these scripts are failing because it looks like python-gnomekeyring has been deprecated and deleted from the archives.

What replaced it? How do I securely store a password via a python script?

2 Answers

It has been replaced by module keyring (see ).

For Gnome Keyring, the backend of keyring can be either SecretService or Gnome.Keyring.

$ keyring --list
keyring.backends.kwallet.DBusKeyringKWallet4 (priority: 3.9)
keyring.backends.kwallet.DBusKeyring (priority: 4.9)
keyring.backends.chainer.ChainerBackend (priority: 10)
keyrings.alt.Gnome.Keyring (priority: 1)
keyring.backends.fail.Keyring (priority: 0)
keyring.backends.SecretService.Keyring (priority: 5)

A default backend can be specified by creating $HOME/.config/python_keyring/keyringrc.cfg with

[backend]
default-keyring=keyring.backends.SecretService.Keyring

It appears that the answer is libsecret

However, it also appears that some functionality has been removed.

In libsecret you can unlock items directly, and the result is (with gnome-keyring daemon) that the enclosing collection will be unlocked.

It is no longer possible to pass a password to unlock keyrings. These are automatically prompted for.