dfwinreg
open-sourceThe section your link pointed to isn't on dfwinreg's page any more, so we've brought you to the top.
dfWinReg provides read-only access to Windows Registry objects via a generic interface resembling the Registry key hierarchy on a live Windows system.
Summary
dfwinreg is an open-source Python library that provides read-only access to Windows Registry objects, presenting them through a key hierarchy that resembles what you'd see browsing the Registry on a live Windows system. It is imported into other code rather than run on its own, which makes it a fit for forensic tool developers and DFIRDFIRDigital forensics and incident response, investigating what happened during a security incident and containing it. The work includes preserving evidence, reconstructing activity and restoring systems. practitioners building parsers or analysis pipelines rather than analysts wanting a point-and-click viewer. It originates from the Plaso project, which its documentation credits as the source of its design ideas, and it now exists as a standalone dependency other projects can build on. Its scope stays narrow and specific: reading registry structures, not interpreting them. Started in 2015 and maintained by a single contributor, it remains active, with 22 commits in the past year and a release 131 days ago.
dfWinReg provides read-only access to Windows Registry objects via a generic interface resembling the Registry key hierarchy on a live Windows system.
How dfwinreg helps
Which keys and values does a registry hive actually contain, without booting the machine it came from?
walks the hive through the same key-and-subkey hierarchy Windows itself would show, so code can browse it path by path instead of parsing raw structures
Can code written to walk one registry hive format also walk another?
exposes different underlying file types through the same key interface, so a parser written against the interface does not change when the hive format underneath does
How do I test a parser's logic against registry values I made up, without a real hive on hand?
offers an in-memory key hierarchy that can be populated by hand, so parser code can be exercised against known values before it ever sees a real hive
Which subkeys and values live beneath a given point in the hive, several levels deep?
provides iteration across a key's subkeys and their own subkeys in turn, so a caller can walk an entire branch without writing its own recursion
Can a search for keys or values use wildcards the way an analyst would type them?
converts glob-style patterns into the matching logic used to search key paths, so lookups do not require writing full paths or regular expressions by hand
Languages
Command line
| option | found in | since | description |
|---|
Values are placeholders taken from each option’s declared default. Nothing is executed here — the output shown is a recording of a run that already happened.
Score card
-
Shipping velocity releases a month, last 12 months
-
Documentation quality release-notes rubric, 0–100
-
Breaking-change discipline how rarely a release breaks users, and notice given
-
Maintenance risk quiet time against its own cadence, maintainers
-
Innovation & surface new capabilities, API and MCP surface
- Community health
-
Contributor trend distinct committers, this year against last
-
Maintainer concentration bus factor now against a year ago
-
Issue backlog trend issues closed per issue opened, 12 months
-
Responsiveness median time to a maintainer’s first reply
Nine scores for dfwinreg, each built from the releases, notes and API history this site tracks — and, on Researcher and Business, where it stands among every measured tool in its category and how that has moved.
Score cards are part of every paid plan.
See plans → Already subscribed? Sign in →Trajectory
Blank means never measured; nothing here is a filled-in zero.
Peer standings are included with Researcher and Business. See how this tool ranks against its competitors, using data we don't publish anywhere else.
See plans →Each score is 0–100 on a published rubric, derived from data this site already shows. A dimension we cannot measure says so — it is never scored 0 and never enters a rank.
How this is scored
- Shipping velocity — releases a month over the last 12 months, on a log scale where 16 a month scores 100. Needs 3 releases in the window.
- Documentation quality — the release-notes rubric published on the analytics page, unchanged.
- Breaking-change discipline — the share of releases carrying a breaking change (none scores 100, half or more scores 0). Only projects that label breaking changes are measured: a clean record cannot be told from an unlabelled one.
- Maintenance risk — quiet time measured against the tool's own release cadence (quiet longer than 90 days and three typical gaps scores 0), plus the number of active maintainers and whether contributors are growing, where known. Higher is lower risk.
- Innovation & surface — new capabilities in the feature ledger this year, API and MCP operations added, and the share of commits that are features: the mean of whichever we hold.
- Community health (open-source tools only) — each is a direction, not a size: contributors this year against last, the bus factor now against a year ago, and issues closed per issue opened, where steady scores 50, doubled 100 and halved 0; plus the median time to a maintainer's first reply (an hour scores about 100, a month or more 0). A commercial card has no repository and carries none of the four.
- Documented delivery (commercial tools) — when a vendor's documented new capabilities have slowed against its own baseline, that counts against the overall standing as heavily as two low dimensions. Steady delivery, or too little history to judge, leaves the standing alone; it is never a sixth score.
- Open-source tools are scored on repository signals; commercial tools on their published changelog. Ranks compare tools within one category and one profile and need at least five measured peers; the overall standing needs three ranked dimensions. Best-in-breed or consolidator is a shape, not a quality, and is never scored.
Release-note detail over time
See how much detail dfwinreg puts in its release notes, quarter by quarter, and compare it with tracked tools in the same category. This history uses up to ten retained, reviewed notes per tool; sparse or blank older quarters may reflect that limit.
Checking release-note history…
Releases
Nothing shipped since we started watching. Releases and docs updates land here as they happen.
Project health
Issue, contributor and maintainer activity in log2timeline/dfwinreg, 2023-10 – 2026-09, as of 2026-09-25. Twelve-month figures first; the trend lines run the whole window.
- Contributors 1 ±0 vs prior 12 months
- Maintainers 1 +0 joined · −0 left, last 12 months
- Bus factor 1 committers behind half the commits
- Community-filed not measured of issues opened, last 12 months
- Median time to close not measured issues closed, last 12 months
- Open backlog 8 of 28 issues ever filed
- Issues opened / month 0 · 0 communitymaintainers
- Open backlog 8
- Contributors / month 0
- Commits / month 0
- Stars 55
Counts from the project's public repository and git history; no individuals are identified. Maintainers are the committers covering 80% of the last year's commits. how we measure this
Libraries its release ships
What its latest release locks, checked against known advisories.None of its release's images build from a lockfile we can read.
Add the badge to your README
Maintain this project? The badge links readers straight to this page, so they can follow every release here.
Choose a badge style and copy the code →