passlib seems to be useful if you need to use hashes stored by an existing system. If you have control of the format, use a modern hash like bcrypt or scrypt. At this time, bcrypt seems to be much easier to use from python.
passlib supports bcrypt, and it recommends installing py-bcrypt as a backend: http://pythonhosted.org/passlib/lib/passlib.hash.bcrypt.html
https://code.google.com/p/py-bcrypt/ The readme has examples of basic use.
How to use scrypt to generate hash for password and salt in Python