HackerReposA FIELD GUIDE TO OPEN SOURCE
ProSponsor the shelf♧ 0
← Back to top all-time
spotify
luigi
Python2012–2024
spotify / luigi

luigi

Luigi is a Python module that helps you build complex pipelines of batch jobs. It handles dependency resolution, workflow management, visualization etc. It also comes with Hadoop support built in.

33Distinct people
39Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
18.8KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Luigi is a Python module that helps you build complex pipelines of batch jobs. It handles dependency resolution, workflow management, visualization etc. It also comes with Hadoop support built in.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year39 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2012-09-20 15:18:10 UTC to 2024-02-27 12:26:26 UTC.

02468102012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 2 submissions, 0 comments20122013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 2 submissions, 0 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 1 submissions, 4 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 1 submissions, 5 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 9 mentions; 0 submissions, 9 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20122012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC220
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC220
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC514
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC615
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC909
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 12, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
Luigi is a Python (3.10, 3.11, 3.12, 3.13, 3.14 tested) package that helps you build complex pipelines of batch jobs. It handles dependency resolution, workflow management, visualization, handling failures, command line integration, and much more. Getting Started Run pip install luigi to install the latest stable version from PyPI. Documentation for the latest release is hosted on readthedocs. Run pip install luigi[toml] to install Luigi with TOML-based configs support. For the bleeding edge code, pip install git+https://github.com/spotify/luigi.git. Bleeding edge documentation is also available. Background The purpose of Luigi is to address all the plumbing typically associated with long-running batch processes. You want to chain many tasks, automate them, and failures will happen. These tasks can be anything, but are typically long running things like Hadoop jobs, dumping data to/from databases, running machine learning algorithms, or anything else. There are other software packages that focus on lower level aspects of data processing, like Hive, Pig, or Cascading. Luigi is not a framework to replace these. Instead it helps you stitch many tasks together, where each task can be a Hive query, a Hadoop job in Java, a Spark job in Scala or Python, a Python snippet, dumping a table from a database, or anything else. It's easy to build up long-running pipelines that comprise thousands of tasks and take days or weeks to complete. Luigi takes care of a lot of the workflow management so that you can focus on the tasks themselves and their dependencies. You can build pretty much any task you want, but Luigi also comes with a toolbox of several common task templates that you use. It includes support for running Python mapreduce jobs in Hadoop, as well as Hive, and Pig, jobs. It also comes with file system abstractions for HDFS, and local files that ensures all file system operations are atomic. This is important because it means your data pipeline will not crash in a state containing partial data. Visualiser page The Luigi server comes with a web interface too, so you can search and filter among all your tasks. Dependency graph example Just to give you an idea of what Luigi does, this is a screen shot from something we are running in production. Using Luigi's visualiser, we get a nice visual overview of the dependency graph of the workflow. Each node represents a task which has to be run. Green tasks are already completed whereas yellow tasks are yet to be run. Most of these tasks are Hadoop jobs, but there are also some things that run locally and build up data files. Philosophy Conceptually, Luigi is similar to GNU Make where you have certain tasks and these tasks in turn may have dependencies on other tasks. There are also some similarities to Oozie and Azkaban. One major difference is that Luigi is not just built specifically for Hadoop, and it's easy to extend it with other kinds of tasks. Everything in Luigi is in Python. Instead of XML configuration or similar external data files, the dependency graph is specified within Python. This makes it easy to build up complex dependency graphs of tasks, where the dependencies can involve date algebra or recursive references to other versions of the same task. However, the workflow can trigger things not in Python, such as running Pig scripts or scp'ing files. Who uses Luigi? We use Luigi internally at Spotify to run thousands of tasks every day, organized in complex dependency graphs. Most of these tasks are Hadoop jobs. Luigi provides an infrastructure that powers all kinds of stuff including recommendations, toplists, A/B test analysis, external reports, internal dashboards, etc. Since Luigi is open source and without any registration walls, the exact number of Luigi users is unknown. But based on the number of unique contributors, we expect hundreds of enterprises to use it. Some users have written blog posts or held presentations about Luigi: Spotify (presentation, 2014) Foursquare (presentation, 2013) Mortar Data (Datadog) (documentation / tutorial) Stripe (presentation, 2014) Buffer (blog, 2014) SeatGeek (blog, 2015) Treasure Data (blog, 2015) Growth Intelligence (presentation, 2015) AdRoll (blog, 2015) 17zuoye (presentation, 2015) Custobar (presentation, 2016) Blendle (presentation) TrustYou (presentation, 2015) Groupon / OrderUp (alternative implementation) Red Hat - Marketing Operations (blog, 2017) GetNinjas (blog, 2017) voyages-sncf.com (presentation, 2017) Open Targets (blog, 2017) Leipzig University Library (presentation, 2016) / (project) Synetiq (presentation, 2017) Glossier (blog, 2018) Data Revenue (blog, 2018) Uppsala University (tutorial) / (presentation, 2015) / (slides, 2015) / (poster, 2015) / (paper, 2016) / (project) GIPHY (blog, 2019) xtream (blog, 2019) CIAN (presentation, 2019) Some more companies are using Luigi but haven't had a chance yet to write about it: Schibsted enbrite.ly Dow Jones / The Wall Street Journal Hotels.com Newsela Squarespace OAO Grovo Weebly Deloitte Stacktome LINX+Neemu+Chaordic Foxberry Okko ISVWorld Big Data Movio Bonnier News Starsky Robotics BaseTIS Hopper VOYAGE GROUP/Zucks Textpert Tracktics Whizar xtream Skyscanner Jodel Mekar M3 Assist Digital Meltwater DevSamurai Veridas Aidentified We're more than happy to have your company added here. Just send a PR on GitHub. External links Mailing List for discussions and asking questions. (Google Groups) Releases (PyPI) Source code (GitHub) Hubot Integration plugin for Slack, Hipchat, etc (GitHub) Authors Luigi was built at Spotify, mainly by Erik Bernhardsson and Elias Freider. Many other people have contributed since open sourcing in late 2012. Arash Rouhani was the chief maintainer from 2015 to 2019, and now Spotify's Data Team maintains Luigi.
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

39 sources
I agree there are many options in this space. Two others to consider: - https://airflow.apache.org/ - https://github.com/spotify/luigi There are also many Kubernetes based options out there. For the specific use case you specified, you might even consider a plain old Makefile and incrond if you expect these all to run on a single host and be triggered by a new file showing up in a directory… I like Airflow because you can give access to the web UI to operators and they can kick/run/stop tasks or graphs of tasks. Both Airflow and Luigi expect you to express your workflow as a DAG in Python code.
In Ask HN: What is the correct way to deal with pipelines?
I used Luigi [1] to automate data processing at a previous job. It's a simple job queue with a UI. You request jobs from it, and then run them for minutes or hours, so it shouldn't normally be a bottleneck and it makes sense to use a language that's quick and easy to write. It's written in Python and works fine to process thousands of jobs per day. Once you start having tens of thousands of jobs in the queue, it gets slow enough that it can back things up. This compounds the problem, eventually resulting in the whole thing crashing. By switching the interpreter to PyPy, I was able to keep the data pipeline running at that scale without having to rewrite anything. [1] https://github.com/spotify/luigi
In PyPy Project looking for sponsorship to add support for Apple Silicon
There are too many different tools in the space. I've been heavily researching workflow / ETL frameworks this week, and even after culling the ones that seemed like poor fits, I'm still left with: - https://github.com/getpopper/popper - https://docs.pachyderm.com/ - https://github.com/lyft/flyte - https://aws.amazon.com/step-functions/ - https://github.com/spotify/luigi - https://docs.metaflow.org/ - https://github.com/dagster-io/dagster - https://github.com/argoproj/argo - https://github.com/prefecthq/prefect
In Introduction to Apache Airflow
"Let’s dispel with the myth that ORMs make code cleaner. Join the embedded-SQL movement and discover a much more readable, much more straightforward way to query databases." Any argument whatsoever for this? Would love to see an example of how when you do away with the whole object persistence layer, and you just have a SQL string (which ORMs allow you to do anyway), how do you get your parameters over, how do you get your rows back, how do you manage your transactional scope, how do you get your rows in and out of your objects? all of which has nothing to do with a SQL string. Well let's read on: "Erik Bernhardsson... is the CTO at Better, which is a startup changing how mortgages are done. I write a lot of code, some of which ends up being open sourced, such as Luigi and Annoy. " Open source stuff! Let's go there and see an example
Read the rest
of this "write raw SQL and don't use any persistence libraries and your code is readable and straightforward", because nobody ever seems to actually want to illustrate this and how they don't end up writing their own ORM anyway, and we see, oh https://github.com/spotify/luigi/blob/master/luigi/db_task_h..., it's SQLAlchemy ORM. Foiled again in my search to see this elusive super clean and simple raw SQL with no ORM that doesn't reinvent an ORM anyway. Which is the real "myth" ?
In I don't want to learn your query language
Nice! This is an approach I hope will be used much more, to generate CLIs and other interfaces. Luigi [1] does something similar, in that it auto-creates an API that lets you call any task in your task dependency graph, and provide parameters as arguments to flags. One of the things that made working with Luigi such a breeze (although we experienced other problems for our use cases). [1] https://github.com/spotify/luigi
In Python Fire – Generates CLIs from any Python object

Showing the 15 most recent of 39 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.

MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME

A few shortcuts

/
Search the collection
?
Open this guide
Esc
Close dialogs and navigation

Your saved repositories and interests stay in this browser.