pem: PEM file parsing for Python

pem is a Python module for parsing and splitting of PEM files, i.e. Base64-encoded DER keys and certificates.

It has no dependencies and does not attempt to interpret the certificate data in any way.

It’s born from the need to load keys, certificates, trust chains, and Diffie–Hellman parameters from various certificate deployments: some servers (like Apache) expect them to be a separate file, others (like nginx) expect them concatenated to the server certificate and finally some (like HAProxy) expect key, certificate, and chain to be in one file. With pem, your Python application can cope with all of those scenarios:

>>> import pem
>>> certs = pem.parse_file("chain.pem")
>>> certs
[<Certificate(PEM string with SHA-1 digest '...')>, <Certificate(PEM string with SHA-1 digest '...')>]
>>> str(certs[0])
'-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----\n...'

Additionally to the vanilla parsing code, pem also contains helpers for Twisted that save a lot of boilerplate code.

Project Information

• License: MIT
• PyPI
• Source Code
• Documentation
• Changelog

Credits

pem is written and maintained by Hynek Schlawack.

The development is kindly supported by my employer Variomedia AG and all my amazing GitHub Sponsors.

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Release Information

Removed

• Support for Python 2.7, 3.5, and 3.6 has been dropped.

Added

• Support for RFC 4880 OpenPGP private & public keys: pem.OpenPGPPublicKey and pem.OpenPGPPrivateKey. #72
• Support for intra-payload headers like the ones used in OpenPGP keys using the meta_headers property. #75
• pem.parse_file() now accepts also pathlib.Path objects.
• pem.parse() now also accepts str.
• Added text_payload, bytes_payload and decoded_payload properties to all PEM objects that allow to directly access the payload without the envelope and possible headers. #74

→ Full Changelog