SkPy

An unofficial Python library for interacting with the Skype HTTP API.

Here be dragons

The upstream APIs used here are undocumented and are liable to change, which may cause parts of this library to fall apart in obvious or non-obvious ways. You have been warned.

Requirements

• Python 2.6+ (includes 3.x)
• BeautifulSoup
• Requests[1]
• Responses (for tests)

Getting started

The documentation gives some examples in more detail, as well as a full API specification, but here are the basics to get you started:

from skpy import Skype
sk = Skype(username, password) # connect to Skype

sk.user # you
sk.contacts # your contacts
sk.chats # your conversations

ch = sk.chats.create(["joe.4", "daisy.5"]) # new group conversation
ch = sk.contacts["joe.4"].chat # 1-to-1 conversation

ch.sendMsg(content) # plain-text message
ch.sendFile(open("song.mp3", "rb"), "song.mp3") # file upload
ch.sendContact(sk.contacts["daisy.5"]) # contact sharing

ch.getMsgs() # retrieve recent messages

Rate limits and sessions

If you make too many authentication attempts, the Skype API may temporarily rate limit you, or require a captcha to continue. For the latter, you will need to complete this in a browser with a matching IP address.

To avoid this, you should reuse the Skype token where possible. A token only appears to last 24 hours (web.skype.com forces re-authentication after that time), though you can check the expiry with sk.tokenExpiry. Pass a filename as the third argument to the Skype() constructor to read and write session information to that file.

Event processing

Make your class a subclass of SkypeEventLoop, then override the onEvent(event) method to handle incoming messages and other events:

from skpy import SkypeEventLoop, SkypeNewMessageEvent
class SkypePing(SkypeEventLoop):
    def __init__(self):
        super(SkypePing, self).__init__(username, password)
    def onEvent(self, event):
        if isinstance(event, SkypeNewMessageEvent) \
          and not event.msg.userId == self.userId \
          and "ping" in event.msg.content:
            event.msg.chat.sendMsg("Pong!")

Create an instance and call its loop() method to start processing events. For programs with a frontend (e.g. a custom client), you'll likely want to put the event loop in its own thread.

Tests and documentation

Unit tests can be found in the test folder -- client test cases are designed to test the library's behaviour and parsing of mocked API responses, whereas server cases connect to the live Skype API.

The SkPy docs repo holds, in addition to docs for this library, a collection of unofficial documentation for the Skype HTTP APIs at large.

[1] Note that Requests no longer supports Python 3.2 -- the last working version is 2.10.0.