11 Open Source Python Projects You Should Know in 2024 🧑💻🪄
Sep 16, 2024 · 10 min read
Introduction
Python is one of the easiest programming languages, and it can be used in almost every technical field — whether it's data science, automation, IoT, AI, machine learning, or web development. And the most interesting part of Python is that it’s 100% open-source, which makes it even more powerful and dynamic.
Yet, Most developers overlook Python when building their web applications which limits its potential.
In this article, I've covered 11 open-source Python projects that every web developer should keep an eye on.
Let’s Go!🚀
Opal - An Open Policy Administration Layer
If you are a web developer working on a large project where different teams or user groups need to have different access levels to sensitive data, this might be a bit difficult to implement or manage. Opal should be a huge addition to your workflow if this is you.
Opal offers an easy way to enforce permissions to specific users, ensuring that the right people have secure access to the right data. It is an open-source administration layer for managing policies in policy engines like Open Policy Agent and helps teams define an access control flow.
Opal allows web developers to focus on building features while it handles the complex permissions, which simplifies the complexity of managing user roles in applications for different user levels.
Opal’s core features are all about real-time permission, but here’s how it relates to web developers:
It instantly grants and revokes permissions in real time, so web developers don’t need to update user access across their applications manually.
It lets developers write policies as code, making them easier to version, review, and manage.
It can easily be plugged into a secure cloud-based service microservice like AWS or Kubernetes for easy, secure policy updates.
This tool is perfect for anyone looking to include real-time permission updates within their project or application. You can join their Slack channel to learn more about it.
They currently have 4k+ stars on GitHub which shows they have a wider community support and trust. You can also support them by starring their project:
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Taipy - Build Python Data & AI web applications
Have you ever wanted to build a simple AI project without complicating it by using a front-end framework? If so, this tool is for you.
Taipy is a tool for creating data or AI-powered web applications using Python and an existing model. It’s designed for machine learning engineers and data analysts who need a quick way to visualize data, Python developers looking for an easy solution to build a full project, and business analysts who want a straightforward way to create a custom data dashboard with basic functionality.
Taipy builds components, graphical interfaces, and dashboards using Python commands. It's primarily used for data-driven projects and is ideal for handling large datasets.
Taipy is well-suited for complex workflows, offering nodes to process them efficiently, and it integrates with pandas, allowing you to manipulate data directly within the project.
Reflex - Build web apps in pure Python
As a pure Python developer or a backend developer with no knowledge of frontend development, I know the pain of not having a way to showcase your project because it’s usually all code and has no user interface. If this is you, this tool is a game changer.
With reflex, you can build interactive user interfaces in the simplest way using pure Python so quickly and easily; how cool is that!
This reduces the need to learn the newest, shiny frontend framework; it handles user interface and server logic.
This tool works by building components from pure Python, compared to traditional web development, where a full-stack application has two separate apps: one that handles the user interface and the other that handles the server logic or state management. This could be React for the user interface and Flask for the server logic. In Reflex, everything is built in one codebase and could be stored in one project file.
In addition, you won’t need to learn how to deploy on Heroku, AWS, or Azure. Reflex offers an easy way to deploy your project with a single command.
Crawlee - Web scraping and browser automation library
Scraping is useful because it lets you collect large amounts of data from websites anonymously, which helps in market research, business analysis, AI training, and competition analysis. This is primarily done using Javascript rendering or an HTTP library. To make scraping easy and fun, crawlee was introduced.
Crawlee is a tool focused on making web scraping very easy for any developer. This is an open-source project built with Python. Crawlee was initially built for Typescript developers, and it currently has 13k stars and over 100k+ downloads.
Crawlee for Python was built to make web scraping in Python very simple, and compared to a basic HTTP library for scraping, crawlee offers the following:
It supports beautiful soup, HTTPX, and a headless browser like Playwright to scrape websites with or without Javascript rendering.
It uses proxy rotation and session management that help avoid getting blocked by websites, making it super easy to scrape websites with anti-bot measures.
It is built on async io, which makes it high-performing for I/O-bound operations or large projects that are scrapped
Portkey AI Gateway - Control panel for AI apps
Since the release of ChatGPT, AI has been a hot topic in nearly every tech conversation. It is a bit difficult to see a startup that isn’t adding some AI feature to their product. As a web developer trying to explore the current AI marketplace but not so thrilled about the headaches of handling a complex large language model infrastructure, this tool might be exactly what you need.
Portkey is an open-source AI gateway designed to make integrating large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI, Phi-3, and Anthropic effortless. It allows developers to quickly build AI-powered features without dealing with the headaches of LLM infrastructure.
AI gateway handles API calls across multiple AI providers, making it easy to switch between models, manage prompts, and track performance. Plus, with features like caching, load balancing, and retries, it ensures your app stays fast and reliable.
LLMware - AI for complex enterprise
If I want to learn how to build and deploy large language models, LLMware would be my go-to tool. It's designed for people like me who don't need an in-depth understanding of LLMs but still want to experiment with them. It offers pre-built LLM components and ready-to-use, customizable models that let me create chatbots quickly.
With LLMware, web developers don’t need to build models from scratch—they can focus on fine-tuning existing models to meet their needs. LLMware manages the scaling and performance monitoring of LLMs, allowing me to concentrate on the creative side of building an AI-powered tool. Best of all, it offers a wide variety of models to choose from.
When building your next AI-powered project, consider using LLMware to handle the model's infrastructure while you focus on creating the interactive aspects of the project.
LLMware has 4.5k+ stars on GitHub so they are widely supported by the open-source community.
Beautiful Soup - web scraping tool
Every web developer needs to understand how scraping works at least once in their career because it helps you collect large amounts of data from websites for research. Beautiful Soup is a great tool that does just this.
It’s an open-source Python library that pulls data from HTML and XML sites or pages using a parser. It has a unique way of searching the sites and modifying the data, which can save you hours of stress and possibly debugging.
Every web scraping tool in Python exists because of the beauty of beautiful soup, so if you need to build your tool, consider using this library.
Gunicorn - Python WSGI HTTP server for UNIX
Gunicorn, short for Green Unicorn, is a Python WSGI HTTP server many Python developers use, but its true value in running web applications often goes unnoticed. Imagine you are working on a Python project and need to handle multiple user requests at once smoothly. Gunicorn steps in to do some behind-the-scenes magic. It handles the request smoothly, so you won’t need to worry about server management.
The workhorse's main star is the WSGIs, which are web server gate interfaces that define the flow of how web servers talk to web applications. Gunicorn is a middleman between a web server like Nginx or Apache and web applications like Django and Flask.
If you plan on building full-stack applications using a Python framework, you need to familiarize yourself with this tool. It is perfect for managing large Python projects.
Scrapy - web scraping tool
Scrapy isn’t just a web scraping tool, it's a framework that offers far more than Beautiful Soup. While Beautiful Soup helps you extract data from HTML and XML files, Scrapy takes it further by fetching everything from the page, following the links, saving the data, scraping the data, and lots more.
Scrapy is built to handle large scraping projects or tasks because it has built-in support for crawling. The only downside is setting it up. It has a steep learning curve and could take a while for inexperienced developers who are not familiar with web scraping.
If you are looking for an automated tool to handle multiple-page scraping on a large scale, Scray should be your go-to toolkit, offering everything in one place.
Wagtail - Open-source Python CMS
CMS, or Content management system, is software that lets users create, manage, and modify content on a website without a technical background or knowledge. This is perfect for bloggers who want to manage their blogs but do not know how to create a blog from scratch.
Wagtail is an open-source CMS built on Python that offers an easy way to manage content on a website. It gives you complete control over the front end, letting you build customizable pages. Since it’s built on Django, it is familiar with the MVC architecture, making it perfect for small or large projects.
This tool was designed to make managing content super easy and efficient. It also has features for collaboration among team members.
Streamlit - A faster way to build data apps
Last but not least on today’s list is Streamlit. I first tried Streamlit when I wanted to build an AI-powered tool but didn’t want to build a user interface using a front-end framework.
Streamlit offers an easy and fast way to build web apps, similarly to Taipy, it offers a responsive means to create a data app with ease. Although it is best used for building machine learning apps or visualizing data dashboards, Streamlit can be used to build a simple, basic app.
Although it doesn't offer the same level of responsiveness as Taipy, Streamlit is still an excellent choice for anyone looking to build AI-powered apps with Python. One thing I love about Streamlit is its simplicity and ease of use, which makes it perfect for prototyping any data or AI-powered app.
Conclusion
To wrap this article up, the open-source Python projects mentioned in this list are important because they could help improve your development workflow and the performance of your web applications.
Python developers are mostly tasked with either solely working on the backend aspect of a web project or analyzing data, but with these tools, you can build full-stack web apps, full web scraping apps, or work on a CMS in a web project without the need to understand frontend.
If we missed any tool you think is perfect for Python developers or your favorite tool, share them in the comments.
I hope you love this. Thank you!
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Also published on DEV.to.