by Adam Goldschmidt

10 External Python packages you are going to love

Python is an experiment in how much freedom programmers need. Too much freedom and nobody can read another’s code; too little and expressiveness is endangered. - Guido van Rossum

This freedom that Guido talks about is part of what makes Python so popular. That popularity, among other, is what attracts more and more developers to use the language - eventually leading to some really amazing open source projects.

I usually find myself project hunting on GitHub once a day. Throughout this article, I will try to cover 10 wonderful packages that you may or may not be familiar with. I will start from the less trendy and end up with… well, Flask.

Let’s begin!

Loguru — Logging made easy

This is a really awesome package I regularly use in my projects. It describes itself as “a library which aims to bring enjoyable logging in Python”. This package just lets you easily configure your logs out of the box.

All you have to do after installing is to import the module:

from loguru import logger

And you’re free to use it out of the box:

logger.debug("Hello, cool debugger")

The documentation is good and there are many customization options.

more-itertools

A variety of interesting methods that could sometimes come very useful, such as peekable:

>>> p = peekable(['a', 'b'])>>> p.peek()'a'>>> next(p)'a'

or chunked:

>>> list(chunked([1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], 3))[[1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6]]

MonkeyType — Static type annotations generator

monkeytype run myscript.py

This package automatically generates type annotations for you, either in a stub file or in the source code itself, by collecting runtime types. Right, Python doesn’t enforce you to use annotations — but I believe they are very important for readability of the code (and sometimes for avoiding errors), which is also why there are 2 more packages in this list that are handling type annotations :)

Pyright — Static type checker

Exciting new package coming from Microsoft. The inital commit was just 17 days ago! This package is the competitor of Mypy (also on this list). To be honest, I haven’t yet had the chance to use it, but I definitely plan to. I currently use mypy as a type checker, but I’ll give this one a try!

requests-async — support for async/await syntax for requests

This is a new package I discovered the other day on GitHub, and it seems pretty promising. We all know the requests package, that lets us easily handle HTTP requests in our code. Well, this package implements async and await words for these requests:

import requests_async as requests​response = await requests.get('https://example.org')print(response.status_code)print(response.text)

Pretty cool right?

HTTPie — Modern command line cURL

Those of you who have used cURL before, must know it’s not that fun. Having to remember the parameters names, making sure your data is encapsulated… Well, HTTPie aims to make this much easier. Here’s one of their examples, of submitting form data:

http -f POST example.org hello=World

pipenv — Better packaging for Python

When I start a new project, I always create a new virtualenv and install some basic packages with pip. I then need to save these packages names in a file, be it setup.py or requirements.txt. Those of you who have worked with npm, know it's much simpler there. All you need to do is write npm —save and the package name is saved in your package.json. That's why I first created pypkgfreeze, a simple package to "freeze" the versions of your currently used pip packages into setup.py.

Anyway, pipenv is an interesting solution that aims to merge the two worlds - They describe it best in their repo page:

It automatically creates and manages a virtualenv for your projects, as well as adds/removes packages from your Pipfile as you install/uninstall packages. It also generates the ever-important Pipfile.lock, which is used to produce deterministic builds.

You can try it out here.

mypy — Static type checker

As I said before, this is the package I currently use as my standard static type checker. It helps me keep my code readable and elegant (I think).

black

I have tried many Python formatters, and black is clearly my favourite. The syntax looks neat, and the command line runs quick and can either check the files or actually edit them - very useful for CI/CD. You can even try it here!

flask

Not sure if I have anything to write here that hasn’t been written before. You are probably familiar with this astonishing micro framework, and if you’re not.. you definitely should check it out.

Before you go…

Thanks for reading! You can follow my GitHub account for more cool repos. I tend to star every cool thing that I see :)

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