Design & Limitations¶

There are two parts to Jeepney:

The core is all about creating D-Bus messages, serialising them to bytes, and deserialising bytes into Message objects. It aims to be a complete & reliable implementation of the D-Bus wire protocol. It follows the idea of “Sans-I/O”, implementing the D-Bus protocol independent of any means of sending or receiving the data.

The second part is I/O integration. This supports the typical use case for D-Bus - connecting to a message bus on a Unix socket - with various I/O frameworks. There is one integration module for each framework, and they provide similar interfaces (Connections and Routers), but differ as much as necessary to fit in with the different frameworks - e.g. the Trio integration uses channels where the asyncio integration uses queues.

Jeepney also allows for a similar split in code using it. If you want to wrap the desktop notifications service, for instance, you can write (or generate) a message generator class for it. The same message generator class can then be wrapped in a proxy for any of Jeepney’s I/O integrations.

Non-goals¶

Jeepney does not (currently) aim for:

Very high performance. Parsing binary messages in pure Python code is not the fastest way to do it, but for many use cases of D-Bus it’s more than fast enough.
Supporting all possible D-Bus transports. The I/O integration layer only works with Unix sockets, the most common way to use D-Bus. If you need to use another transport, you can still use Message.serialise() and Parser, and deal with sending & receiving data yourself.
Supporting all authentication options. The auth module only provides what the I/O integration layer uses.
High-level server APIs. Jeepney’s API for D-Bus servers is on a low-level, sending and receiving messages, not registering handler methods. See dbus-objects for a server API built on top of Jeepney.
‘Magic’ introspection. Some D-Bus libraries use introspection at runtime to discover available methods, but Jeepney does not. Instead, it uses introspection during development to write message generators (Generating D-Bus wrappers).

Alternatives¶

GTK applications can use Gio.DBusConnection or a higher-level wrapper like dasbus or pydbus. There are also GObject wrappers for specific D-Bus services, e.g. secret storage and desktop notifications.
PyQt applications can use the Qt D-Bus module. This has been available in PyQt for many years, and in PySide from version 6.2 (released in 2021).
DBussy works with asyncio. It is a Python binding to the libdbus reference implementation in C, whereas Jeepney reimplements the D-Bus protocol in Python.
dbus-python is the original Python binding to libdbus. It is very complete and well tested, but may be trickier to install and to integrate with event loops and async frameworks.