HackerReposA FIELD GUIDE TO OPEN SOURCE
ProSponsor the shelf♧ 0
← Back to top all-time
vinta
awesome-python
Python2014–2026
vinta / awesome-python

awesome-python

The definitive list that answers "I want to do X in Python, which tool should I use?"

29Distinct people
29Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
334.4KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

The definitive list that answers "I want to do X in Python, which tool should I use?"

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

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 6:01:08 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 year29 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2014-06-30 09:31:00 UTC to 2026-10-18 17:16:22 UTC.

0123452014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 2 submissions, 3 comments20142015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 2 submissions, 2 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

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
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC523
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC422
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

3 sources
Lots of different ways: - Find a function call you're making in a library and see how it works - Look through the top python libraries (see https://github.com/vinta/awesome-python ) and pick a few of the simpler ones to flip through For reading code, some things that can be useful: - Flip through test suite and get tests running; then break some tests to see what's happening - Diagram out code on a piece of paper (file structure, data structure, stack trace for a popular call) - Discuss implementation with friends - For certain files, it's often valuable to rewrite yourself
In Effective Engineer – Notes
I did PHP before Python. Done CakePHP, Drupal back in the day. Then did some idiorm + paris w/ slim. That said, I'd like to try to sell you on Python. First off, let's begin by saying PHP is a solid web language with mature tools. I haven't looked at the ecosystem in maybe 5 years. Due to this, I can't speak for PHP 7 and the latest and greatest best practices and libraries. But as of 2017, I think python has surpassed PHP in web development. This is due to some fundamental things being baked into the language, and external factors like luck, timing, and momentum. 0. PHP's "lost years": PHP didn't capitalize on standardization, packaging and libraries for a long time. I don't know what the reason was, but it was PHP 5 for a long time and the language didn't "move". This allowed other languages like ruby to gain ground back in 2005-2012. P
Read the rest
HP 6 never happened. The community had to pull together and start PHP-FIG and stuff. During those years, a lot happened, other language ecosystems gained significant traction. Sure, there were great strides in individual projects like Drupal and Wordpress. But these CMS and frameworks lacked a package manager during that time. And despite being OOP, developers weren't sharing each other's code the same way Ruby and Python did. 1. Code standardization: Python nails this. PEP8 (code style), PEP257 (code documentation). 1.1 Code aesthetic: While the lack of subcolons and block-style struck me as a gimmick for a while (remember I did PHP before python), I came to find it makes code a hell of a lot easier to read. 2. Package management - People started publishing packages early on. Even if there was distutils/setuptools warts for a couple years, the practice of having a real market for code was great. PHP didn't have that for a long time.. anyone remember PEAR? 3. OOP: Python's OOP makes it very clear to move up the class tree. This sort of winds in with the the code style too, you can easily navigate and traverse large codebases and wrap your brain around chunks of code really fast in python. 4. Imports: Better implemented in python. Much more straight forward and clear. You can pull in a full module from your environment's current packages or relative location (import flask or import . mymodule). You can also import objects like constants, functions and classes scoped in a module, like "from mymodule import myfunction", also import as an alias, "from mymodule import myfunction as a". 5. Community: At this point, Python's community is more active. Though PHP seems to be strong as well. People are building websites in PHP and are still successful at it. That says a lot. 6. Use Domains: Python is being used in big data (pyspark), general data science with pandas, numpy, juypter. The web with django, flask. System utilities like supervisor. People can write mobile games with kivy. There are C speedups like Cython. ORM's like Peewee and SQLAlchemy are mature and superbly documented. 6.1 Web: Python's most popular web framework, Django, is very mature. The ORM is very nice. Migrations. Documentation. Flask, a popular framework for Python, also have excellent documentation and many users. And aside from that, there are many other web libraries like Pyramid, and ones I can't even think off the top of my head. Pyramid is actually one I hear great stuff about haven't even tried yet. 7. Runtime implementations: CPython (default), pypy (python-hosted), Jython for Java and IronPython for .NET 8. Performance: pypy, numpy/pandas has tabular / typed speedups. I'm probably forgetting a few. 9. C/C++ integration: Boost.Python, pybind11 (new and highly cool), CFFI, Cython, Swig, and the CPython's own implementation of C API's, which CPython itself builds upon is at your disposal, and ctypes. 10. Documentation: Python itself, as well as the top libraries in the open source community all use Sphinx to generate documentation. Builds nice static, themed HTML sites with a nifty feature called "intersphinx" to link across project documentation. And it's used at scale in the community. Big thanks to ReadTheDocs.org for providing a place for the community to host. In most cases, the above "nice things" about python have been around in production and used at scale long before I did Python full time. This gives python a significant advantage. Some additional free resources on Python: - https://python-guide.readthedocs.io - https://github.com/vinta/awesome-python
In Ask HN: Relaunch my website in Ruby/Python or continue with PHP?
I've made a living of Python since 2.4 and hitting the 3.6, here is my take on it: The Python team does an incredible job at making the language evolve. This is a 20+ years old language, with billions of lines written in the world, and allowing a huge number of paradigms. It still matures, steals ideas, makes hard compromise on growth vs compat, etc. I know very few other techs that can even compare to this level of legacy/flexibility. E.G: the current debate on the mailling list about the "delayed" keyword: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2017-February... (Python-idea is a fantastic mailling list BTW. You learn a lot about programming, community management, Python and humans. It's very approachable, yet you read some very talented people. Sign up ! https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas) Coding in 2.x is now
Read the rest
a pain. You can't see that if you are stuck in 2.7. 3.X doesn't seems appealing because what it brings on the table is not shinny. But the hundreds of small fixes hugely add up, and the experience is not the same at all on any project that takes more than a few days. The good things is, Python 3 won. Nobody starts a new project in 2.x, most important 3rd party libs are have been converted and legacy code is ported every day. Porting a big code base is not really hard (2to3, python-future and python-six do most of the work) and can take only a few hours if you know what you are doing. Which is nothing given Guido have us 15 years to do it. Honestly I had more time porting from Django 1.5 to 1.9 and DRF 1 to 2. Python 3.6 is a wonderful release and a bliss to use. pathlib, f-string, better error handling, absolute imports, diminished verbosity, transparent unicode support, stable asyncio, unpacking everywhere, improved windows support, wheels for so many things, subprocess pools, pip+venv included (although debians admin excluded them, grrrr)... Everytime you go back to an earlier version it feels clunky. The problem is, there are very few tutorials showing you the current best practices. I still read plenty of .format(), os.path.join(), manual subprocess/threads handling, etc. People are still complaining you can't provide a standalone Python program while nuikta have been compiling very well Python for years now. It's even yum/apt installable. Whether you are in Python 2 or 3 though, the ecosystem makes it all. I'm amazed at where I find Python these days. It's the official language for colleges in France, it's installed on Linux and Mac by default, on the raspi (en consequently a recommended language for all students in the UK). It's at Google, Facebook, Instagram, Apple, Disney/Pixar, Sony, the CNES, the NASA, Mozilla, Docker... But also in very heterogeneous places. Blender uses it to script, but most GIS as well. I got clients from everywhere using it: mathematicians, physicists, geographers, sysadmin, bankers, big data analysts, deep learning researchers... In big and small ways. Plus there are so many great 3rd party tools: requests, django, sqlalchemy, numpy, pendulum, begins, jupyter, httpie, faker, marshmallow, autobahn, crossbar, pew are fantastic. But how do you discover those ? The ecosystem is so huge, even curated lists such as https://github.com/vinta/awesome-python are intimidating. On strengh of Python is that it's good a little script upt to big projects. but there is an enormous list of things to learn if you want to get out of the scripter mind set and start coding a big project. - virtualenv. Wait virtualenvwrapper ? Wait pew ? wait pip ? wait conda ? - tox, coverall, pytest, flake8, pylint, bandit... - Python path, modules, __stuff__... And the packaging is still a mess. It's hard to make a setup.py file for a newcommer. And the 1000 files next to it. It's hard to make a compiled extension wheel. To provide a msi, a deb or a dmg. It's hard to do desktop or mobile UI. Kivy and PyQT are nowhere as easy as creating a website, which says it all. Mypy and type hints are not mature enough. Really a pain to use. I would not recommend it right now. Also VSCode and PyCharm makes everything better. I'm a sublime text guy, but the competition rocked it on this one. Asyncio is super low level. Most people should probably just not use it, it's designed to dev high level libs, not to code your service yourself. And most high level libs using it are not mature. The revolution hasn't happened yet, and we need it to happen in the next 2 years. MeteorsJS is here and kicking. JS has the Webpack ecosystem (which sucks, but provide features you don't have in pure Python right now). You see more and more stack with Sass + es 6 + jsx + whatever and the Python tools to do it don't cut it. So you are back to JS. I hate JS. Hosting a Python website is still too complicated. pythonanywhere.com comes close, but beginners want PHP + FTP kind of deployments, and you can't blame them. Not everybody needs the robustness of our pro stacks. Performances, though, has never been an issue for me. I know some people that have indeed the need for it, but my experience is that they are a rare breed. Most people complaining about it want a pony, they don't have a Python performance problem. Nevertheless, I look forward for the gilectomy just to stop hearing the FUD. But I'm not holding my breath. I have more hopes for Pyjion, the Microsoft JIT, though. Their approach is the sanest I've seen. Pypy is nice, but is having a hard time by design. Pyston is dead. Free perf is like free pizza. You don't need it, but hey, free pizza! Also I have a feeling that rust and Python will be very good friends in the future...
In Python past, present, and future with Guido van Rossum [audio]

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.