In May 2013 Google replaced their "Talk" instant messaging product, based on XMPP, with "Hangouts", which adopted a proprietary, non-interoperable protocol. For now it's still possible to connect to Hangouts over XMPP using a third-party client like Pidgin, but features including group messaging are not available.

hangups aims to be an open client for the undocumented Hangouts chat API.

• has basic Python methods for calling some API endpoints
• polling for events works
• receiving push events works
• sending chat messages to a conversation works
• login is not implemented, can be worked around by copying cookies from a browser

Python 3.4 is required (earlier Python 3.x might work but is not tested).

pip install -r requirements.txt

cookies.txt is required to authenticate with Google. Copy your Google cookies into this file. You can copy them directly from a request header.

python -m hangups