Requirements

Requirements depend on your operating system:

• Linux: Install net-tools to provide the ifconfig command.

  On Debian/Ubuntu:

  $ sudo apt install net-tools

  On RHEL/Rocky Linux/Fedora:

  $ sudo yum install net-tools

• macOS: No additional packages are required; ifconfig is included with macOS.

• Windows: wintun.dll is required. When building/installing from source on Windows, the package downloads the signed Wintun 0.14.1 archive from Wintun, verifies its SHA-256 checksum, and bundles the DLL matching the Python platform. This requires network access during installation. Wheels are platform-tagged; build Windows wheels on Windows to include the DLL. Source distributions build locally on any supported OS.

Creating and configuring a TUN device may require administrator or root privileges.

Installation

You can install, upgrade, and uninstall pytap3 with these commands:

$ pip install pytap3
$ pip install --upgrade pytap3
$ pip uninstall pytap3

Usage

Using as a context manager automatically brings up the device and closes it at the end of the with block.

from pytap3 import TapDevice

with TapDevice() as device:
    device.ifconfig(mtu=1300)
    device.write(b'0000')

Or manually call up() and close().

from pytap3 import TapDevice

device = TapDevice()
device.up()
device.ifconfig(mtu=1300)
device.write(b'0000')
device.close()

The fileno() method is defined, so that the device object can be passed directly to select(). This might not work on Windows, as the underlying Wintun driver does not support this.

On macOS, configuring an IP address with ifconfig(ip=..., netmask=...) also adds a route for that subnet through the utun interface. Routes that conflict with an existing route may require administrator privileges or manual adjustment.

You can make pytap3 a drop-in replacement for pytap2 by just importing it like this:

import pytap3 as pytap2

Releases