twill: a simple scripting language for Web browsing
twill: a simple scripting language for Web browsing
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 examples!
twill is open source and written in Python.
Downloading twill
The latest release of twill is twill 0.9, released Thursday, December 27th, 2007; it is available for download at http://darcs.idyll.org/~t/projects/twill-0.9.tar.gz. You can also use Python's easy_install to install or upgrade twill.
twill works with Python 2.3 or later.
To start using twill, install it and then type twill-sh. At the prompt type:
go http://www.slashdot.org/ show showforms showhistoryDocumentation
The documentation for the latest release is always at http://twill.idyll.org/.
The in-development version of the docs can be found at http://darcs.idyll.org/~t/projects/twill/doc/.
Documentation is available for the following topics:
- Examples -- some short examples.
- Web browsing with twill -- General introduction to twill.
- Language reference -- the twill scripting language.
- Testing Web sites with twill -- how to use twill to test Web sites.
- Extension modules -- extension modules that come with twill.
- Python API -- for Python programmers interested in using twill from Python.
- Developer information -- for Python developers interested in extending or fixing twill.
- Other tools and packages -- projects relevant to, or based upon, twill.
- Known problems -- those problems that are still lurking in the code.
Mailing List
There's a moderately active mailing list at twill@lists.idyll.org; there is also an archive for this list.
Contributing
Bug reports, fixes, extensions, and links to interesting blog or use case reports are always welcome! You can send them to the mailing list or to Titus directly.
When reporting bugs, please be sure to use the '-f' flag for twill-sh so that we can see the full traceback.
Authors and License
The main author of twill is C. Titus Brown, titus@idyll.org. A number of people have contributed bug reports and code since the first release; they are acknowledged below.
The twill source code is Copyright (C) 2005, 2006, 2007 C. Titus Brown. twill is available under the MIT license.
pyparsing, mechanize, and BeautifulSoup are included with twill for convenience, but are under their own licenses.
Acknowledgements
Cory Dodt had a great idea with PBP, and I thank him for his insight. Ian Bicking gave me 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 the simple demo I showed him and has religiously promoted twill ever since. John J. Lee has promptly and enthusiastically checked in my various patches to mechanize. Michele Simionato is an early adopter who has helped quite a bit. Thanks, guys...
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.
Thanks, all!