GPGME - the API to GnuPG

The recommended way to use the GnuPG crypto stack from your application is GPGME, which is written in C. Here is the online version of the manual.

A number of GPGME bindings for other programming languages/environments exist (Please point us to missing entries or corrections or add them directly in the wiki.):

All / C

• gpgme (GPG Made Easy) is the official GnuPG API. It is implemented in C itself, but this is what you should use from your language as well.

official GPGME bindings

Coming with official GPGME releases are bindings for:

• C++: Based upon the code previously maintained by KDE.
• Qt: Based upon the code previously maintained by KDE.
• Python: Based upon the 'pyme' bindings, should be backwards compatible.
• Common Lisp

The current development versions can be found at git.gnupg.org gpgme/lang.

The GnuPG-Team supports these bindings.

Examples for how to use the bindings

• https://gitlab.com/reiterl/python3-gpg-examples (Python)
• https://heptapod.host/intevation/gnupg/gnupg-scripts/-/tree/main/Python (Python)

Third-party GPGME bindings

C++ wrappers

• http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=kdepimlibs.git gpgme++ is a wrapper for gpgme in kdepimlibs

C# (c-sharp) wrappers

• gpgme-sharp. It is available on NuGet and supports .NET Core The code quality was considered "experimental" and made for 32bits for Windows, but some reported success.

Java wrappers

• GnuPG-for-Java is a Java wrapper for gpgme >=1.5 and GnuPG >=2.x
• GnuPG-for-Java is a Java wrapper for gpgme and GnuPG 1.x
• Gnu Privacy Guard is an Android app based GnuPG-for-Java and uses gpgme to provide a GnuPG engine in Android

PHP wrappers

• https://pecl.php.net/package/gnupg

Python wrappers

Use official python-gpg bindings from GPGME based on PyME, see above. We just document historic alternatives here:

• PyME history: see README of current python3-gpg bindings.

• A different approach (last release from 2012) is https://launchpad.net/pygpgme , manually written wrapper in C for python2 and python3. GNU LGPL v?=2. Packaged for Debian and Ubuntu.

Ruby wrappers

• ruby-gpgme is a ruby wrapper, which can be installed with: gem install gpgme.

Rust wrappers

• gpgm-rs

(not recommended) calling executables directly

A number of elder applications call GnuPG executables in a subprocess and interact with them via command line arguments and file-descriptors. This is less perferable to GPGME, because the command line arguments and text outputs are not an (official) API to GnuPG. While there is an effort made to keep them stable, using the official GPGME API can manage this more precisely and thus you end up with a more robust solution.

C# (c-sharp)

• SharpGPG a GPG wrapper for C# using GPGAPI.

Objective-C

• Libmacgpg is a Mac OS X Framework built on top of GnuPG (but not gpgme), used as part of the GPGTools suite.

PHP

• https://pear.php.net/package/Crypt_GPG seems to call the gpg binary directly. (probably cannot do S/MIME then).

Python

• python-gnupg using the subprocess module to call the gpg executables (not using the recommended gpgme for python alternatives, see above). Xorg Style license.