Ghidra .pyi Generator

The Ghidra .pyi Generator generates .pyi type stubs for the entire Ghidra API. Those stub files can later be used in PyCharm to enhance the development experience.

You can either use the stubs released here, or follow the instructions below to generate them yourself.

Using The Stubs

Installation

The release contains PEP 561 stub package, which can simply be installed with pip install ghidra-stubs*.whl into the environment in which the real ghidra module is available. Any conformant tool will then use the stub package for type analysis purposes.

If you want to manually add the stub files to PyCharm, follow the instructions in Install, uninstall, and upgrade interpreter paths.

Usage

Once installed, all you need to do is import the Ghidra modules as usual, and PyCharm will do the rest.

import ghidra

To get support for the Ghidra builtins, you need to import them as well. The type hints for those exist in the generated ghidra_builtins.pyi stub. Since it is not a real Python module, importing it at runtime will fail. But the .pyi gives PyCharm all the information it needs to help you.

try:
    from ghidra.ghidra_builtins import *
except:
    pass

If you are using ghidra_bridge from a Python 3 environment where no real ghidra module exists you can use a snippet like the following:

import typing
if typing.TYPE_CHECKING:
    import ghidra
    from ghidra.ghidra_builtins import *
else:
    b = ghidra_bridge.GhidraBridge(namespace=globals())

# actual code follows here

typing.TYPE_CHECKING is a special value that is always False at runtime but True during any kind of type checking or completion.

Once done, just code & enjoy.

Dependencies

Ghidra Docs

To properly extract all types from Ghidra, make sure to extract the API documentation.

1. Open the Ghidra CodeBrowser
2. Go to Help -> Ghidra API Help
3. Wait for Ghidra to extract the docs

Python Packages

The script depends on both the attr and typing packages. They are now vendored under the vendor directory as Python2.7 support is gradually being dropped from the ecosystem, making it hard to install and fetch packages.

 
# Create Jython's site-pacakges directory.
jython_site_packages=~/.local/lib/jython2.7/site-packages
mkdir -p $jython_site_packages
 
# Create a PTH file to point Jython to our vendored site-packages

# Outside a virtualenv, use
echo "$(realpath ./vendor)" > $jython_site_packages/python.pth

Creating the .pyi files

GUI

1. Add this directory to the Script Directories in the Ghidra Script Manager
2. Refresh the script list
3. Run generate_ghidra_pyi.py (will be located under IDE Helpers)
4. When a directory-selection dialog appears, choose the directory you'd like to save the .pyi files in.

CLI

$GHIDRA_ROOT/support/analyzeHeadless /tmp tmp -scriptPath $(pwd) -preScript generate_ghidra_pyi.py ./

Python Package

generate_ghidra_pyi.py generates a setup.py inside the directory that was selected.

This allows using pip install to install a PEP 561 stub package that is recognized by PyCharm and other tools as containing type information for the ghidra module.