AutoPy Introduction and Tutorial
by Michael Sanders
Outline
- Introduction
- What is AutoPy?
- How so?
- Getting Started
- Requirements
- Installation
- Hello World
- Tutorials
- Controlling the Mouse
- Working with Bitmaps
- Closing & API Reference
- License
- Summary
- MIT License
- The FreeBSD Documentation License
Introduction
What is AutoPy?
AutoPy is a simple, cross-platform GUI automation toolkit for Python. It includes functions for controlling the keyboard and mouse, finding colors and bitmaps on-screen, and displaying alerts -- all in a cross-platform, efficient, and simple manner.
How so?
- Portable
- Works on Mac OS X, Windows, and X11.
- Efficient
- Written in pure ANSI C.
- Simple
- AutoPy is designed as a toolkit, not a framework -- it doesn't get in your way. At the same time, convenience functions are provided where useful.*
- Easy
- AutoPy is designed to be simple and easy-to-understand, both for the end user and the implementor; that is, both the public API and the internals are straightforward and well-documented. It should be easy to pick up, and easy to modify if you need.
* (Note that this leaves the door wide open for frameworks built off of AutoPy; for instance, a library could be written for a more specific task, such as automating a game, that uses AutoPy as its backbone. This allows framework writers to take advantage of all the above qualities while having the luxury of writing in Python.)