How do I retrieve a username with Python keyring?

Question

I have a Mercurial keyring on my Windows 7 machine. I am using the Python keyring library to get user credentials from the Mercurial keyring.

I can retrieve the password for a given username with:

keyring.get_password('Mercurial', 'user@@etc')

Is there a similar function to retrieve the username?

Answer 1

While keyring was only designed to store passwords, you can abuse get_password to store the username separately.

import keyring

# store username & password
keyring.set_password("name_of_app", "username", "user123")
keyring.set_password("name_of_app", "password", "pass123")

# retrieve username & password
username = keyring.get_password("name_of_app", "username")
password = keyring.get_password("name_of_app", "password")

Alternatively, if you want to keep the username paired with the password:

import keyring

service_id = "name_of_app"
username = "user123"

# store username & password
keyring.set_password(service_id, "username", username)
keyring.set_password(service_id, username, "pass123")

# retrieve username & password
username = keyring.get_password(service_id, "username")
password = keyring.get_password(service_id, username)

Credit to Dustin Wyatt & Alex Chan for this solution.

Answer 2

On Windows I was able to get both username and password (i.e. the "credentials") using

c = keyring.get_credential("servicename", None)

Note that this does not work on macOS, the keyring backend does not have capabilities to search for entries - i.e. you need to know the username. I suppose that native code would allow you to do this, though, see official docs

Answer 3

You are expected to have stored the username somewhere else.

The keyring only stores the password, keyed by the application name and username.