twill Overview¶
twill is a simple language that allows users to browse the Web from a command-line interface. With twill, you can navigate through web sites that use forms, cookies, and most standard Web features.
twill supports automated web testing and has a simple Python interface. Check out the twill Examples!
twill is open source and written in Python.
Downloading twill¶
The latest release of twill is twill version 3.2. It is available for download from the Python Package Index, and you can use Python’s pip tool to install or upgrade twill. Please see the ChangeLog for what’s new in this version.
twill 3.2 works with Python 3.8 and newer.
To start using twill, install it and then type twill.
At the prompt, type:
go https://www.slashdot.org/
show
showforms
showhistory
Documentation¶
The documentation for the latest release is published online at https://twill-tools.github.io/twill/ and https://twill.readthedocs.io/.
Documentation is available for the following topics:
twill Examples – some short examples.
Web browsing with twill – General introduction to twill.
twill language reference – the twill scripting language.
Testing Web sites with twill – how to use twill to test Web sites.
twill Extension Modules – extension modules that come with twill.
twill’s Python API – for programmers interested in using twill from Python.
Developing twill – for developers interested in extending or fixing twill.
Propaganda, tools and packages – projects relevant to, or based upon, twill.
Contributing¶
Issues including bug reports, fixes or extensions and pull requests can be submitted on the GitHub project page.
When reporting bugs, please be sure to use the -f -l debug options
with twill so that we can see the full traceback.
Acknowledgements and History¶
In May 2004, Cory Dodt had a great idea with “Python Browser Poseur” (PBP), his insights helped C. Titus Brown. creating twill. Ian Bicking had the idea of reimplementing PBP on top of IPython (since abandoned in favor of cmd), and suggested the “in-process” hack. Grig Gheorghiu was strangely enthusiastic about a simple demo shown by Titus and promoted twill since then. John J. Lee has promptly and enthusiastically checked in various patches to mechanize created by Titus. Michele Simionato is an early adopter who has also helped quite a bit.
Bug reports have come in from the following fine people: Chris Miles, Matsuno Tokuhiro, Elvelind Grandin, Mike Rovner, sureshvv, Terry Peppers, Kieran Holland, Alexander Shvedunov, Norman Khine, Leonardo Santagada, Sebastien Pierre, Herve Cauwelier, aledain, Uy Do, David Hancock, and Tomi Hautakoski.
Patches have been submitted by Joeri van Ruth, Paul McGuire, Ed Rahn, Nic Ferrier, Robert Leftwich, James Cameron, William Volkman, Tommi Virtanen, Simon Buenzli, sureshvv, Jeff Martin, Stephen Thorne, and Bob Halley.
Features were proposed by Ben Bangert, and Tristan De Buysscher.
In April 2014, Ben Talyor created version 1.8 using requests and lxml instead of mechanize.
In July 2016, Christoph Zwerschke created version 2.0 which also integrates ideas and code from Flunc which was created by Luke Tucker and Robert Marianski in 2006-2007, and from ReTwill which was created in April 2012 as a fork from twill 0.9 by Adam Victor Brandizzi.
The official relaunch of twill on its current GitHub project page and the release of version 2.0 happened in April 2020 with the approval of its original author C. Titus Brown, and Christoph Zwerschke acting as new maintainer of the project.
In February 2021, twill 3.0 was released, followed by twill 3.1 in October 2022, and twill 3.2 in October 2023. These versions do not support Python 2 and more, adding type hints and more modernizations.
Thanks, all!