Installing twill

The recommended way to install twill is to use pip:

pip install twill

You can also install it directly from a downloaded wheel or source distribution file:

pip install twill-3.4.0.tar.gz

Troubleshooting your installation

The first and only thing you should do before creating an issue on the GitHub project page is to see if you have the twill package installed correctly:

python -m twill

(This should drop you into the twill shell irrespective of whether ‘twill’ is on your path.) If this works, twill is installed correctly and you just need to make sure that the directory where pip installs scripts is on your path. If you still need help, or the above command doesn’t work, please include its output when you create an issue – thanks!

Upgrading twill

You can use pip to upgrade twill. To get the latest release, use:

pip install -U twill

To download the latest development release (which is usually pretty stable) use:

pip install -U https://github.com/twill-tools/twill/archive/main.zip

Using twill with AI coding agents

This documentation is also available as llms.txt and llms-full.txt, which are suitable for LLMs and AI coding agents. The second file contains the complete documentation in one plain text file.

The twill repository also contains an agent skill in the directory skills/twill that teaches coding agents how to write, run and debug twill scripts. In Claude Code, you can install it as a plugin with:

/plugin marketplace add twill-tools/twill
/plugin install twill@twill-tools

For other coding agents, copy the directory skills/twill into the directory where the agent looks for skills, or use a skill installer that supports GitHub repositories.