Working with the Registry module

The Registry module, developed by Willi Ballenthin, can be used to obtain keys and values from registry hives. Python provides a built-in registry module named _winreg; however, this module only works on Windows machines. The _winreg module interacts with the registry on the system running the module. It does not support opening external registry hives.

The Registry module allows us to interact with supplied registry hives and can be run on non-Windows machines. The Registry module can be downloaded from https://github.com/williballenthin/python-registry. Click on the releases section to see a list of all stable versions and download version 1.1.0. For this chapter, we use version 1.1.0. Once the archived file is downloaded and extracted, we can run the included setup.py file to install the module. In a command prompt, execute the following code in the module's top-level directory:

python setup.py install

This should install the Registry module successfully...