Creating a Random Password Generator in Python

A quick step by step guide on how to create a simple password generator in Python that uses upper and lower case letters, numbers, and special characters.

1. Import the Necessary Libraries

We will start by importing the ‘random’ and ‘string’ modules. The ‘random ‘ module will be used to generate random numbers, and the ‘string’ module will be used to define a set of characters that will be used to generate the password.

import random
import string

2. Define the ‘generate_password’ Function

Next we’re going to define our function, a function is a block of code that performs a specific task. Python scripts can be made of many different functions all working together to perform complex tasks, but our password generator is very simple so it will just be this one function doing all of the work.

def generate_password(length):

We are going to add the ‘length’ argument that is going to be used to determine the length of the password that will be generated.

3. Define the Character Set

We are going to use the ‘string’ module to set which characters will be used in the password generator. The ‘string.ascii_letters’ variable will contain all the upper and lower case letters, ‘string.digits’ contains all the digits being used (0-9), and ‘string.punctuation’ will contain all our special characters except for @, but this can be put in by adding the character in by itself.

chars = string.ascii_letters + string.digits + string.punctuation +'@'

4. Generate the Password

Now that we’ve defined what characters are going to be used, we need to tell our password generator to generate a password by randomly selecting characters from the character set we’ve defined, as well as making it the length that we tell it to.

password = ''.join(random.sample(chars, length))

5. Return the Generated Password

This will return the password that it generates

return password

6. Call the Function and Print the Results

Our password generator is now finished, now we just need to tell it to run, how long of a password to create and for it to print the result so that we can see it. We do this by calling our ‘generate_password’ function and setting the length to 16 characters, then printing the the output.

password = generate_password(16)
print(password)

This is what the code should look like all together

import random
import string

def generate_password(length):
    chars = string.ascii_letters + string.digits + string.punctuation + '@'
    password = ''.join(random.choice(chars) for _ in range(length))
    return password

password = generate_password(16)
print(password)