You’ve written a script that requires a password, but since the script is meant for inter‐

active use, you’d like to prompt the user for a password rather than hardcode it into the

script.

Python’s getpass module is precisely what you need in this situation. It will allow you

to very easily prompt for a password without having the keyed-in password displayed

on the user’s terminal. Here’s how it’s done:

user = getpass.getuser()

passwd = getpass.getpass()

if svc_login(user, passwd): # You must write svc_login()

print('Yay!')

else:

print('Boo!')

In this code, the svc_login() function is code that you must write to further process

the password entry. Obviously, the exact handling is application-specific.

Note in the preceding code that getpass.getuser() doesn’t prompt the user for their

If you want to explicitly prompt the user for their username, which can be more reliable,

use the built-in input function:

user = input('Enter your username: ')

It’s also important to remember that some systems may not support the hiding of the

typed password input to the getpass() method. In this case, Python does all it can to

forewarn you of problems (i.e., it alerts you that passwords will be shown in cleartext)

before moving on.