A curated list of Python tools, libraries, and resources for automating common developer tasks.

Focused on practical, actively-maintained tools you can drop into real projects. Contributions welcome.

• File & Filesystem
• Data Processing
• Web Scraping
• Task Scheduling
• APIs & Networking
• Browser Automation
• PDF & Documents
• Email
• CLI Tools
• Testing Automation
• Resources

• watchdog — Cross-platform filesystem event monitoring.
• pathlib — Object-oriented filesystem paths (stdlib).
• shutil — High-level file operations (stdlib).
• send2trash — Cross-platform move-to-trash.

• pandas — Data analysis and manipulation.
• polars — Fast DataFrame library (Rust-backed).
• openpyxl — Read/write Excel 2010+ files.
• csvkit — Command-line CSV processing.

• requests — HTTP for humans.
• httpx — Modern async-capable HTTP client.
• beautifulsoup4 — HTML/XML parsing.
• scrapy — Full-featured scraping framework.
• playwright — Browser automation that handles JS.

• schedule — Python job scheduling for humans.
• APScheduler — In-process task scheduler with cron-like triggers.
• rq — Simple Python job queue backed by Redis.

• requests-cache — Transparent caching for requests.
• tenacity — General-purpose retry library.
• python-dotenv — Load .env files.

• playwright-python — Modern cross-browser automation.
• selenium — Classic browser automation.
• pyppeteer — Port of Puppeteer.

• PyPDF2 — Pure-Python PDF library.
• pdfplumber — Better text and table extraction.
• python-docx — Read/write Word .docx files.

• smtplib — SMTP client (stdlib).
• yagmail — Gmail SMTP wrapper.
• imap-tools — Work with IMAP mailboxes.

• click — Composable command-line framework.
• typer — Click built on type hints.
• rich — Rich text and formatting in terminal.

• pytest — The Python testing framework.
• hypothesis — Property-based testing.
• locust — Scalable user load testing.

• Full Stack Python — Automation
• Real Python — Automate the Boring Stuff archive
• Python Automation Toolkit (preview) — 3 free standalone scripts (bulk file renamer, CSV merger, API cacher).

Pull requests welcome. Please:

• Link must be to an actively maintained project (commit within last 12 months).
• Include a one-line description focused on what the tool does.
• Keep categories focused — if a tool fits multiple, pick the best one.

To the extent possible under law, the author has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.