Development Status
- 5 - Production/Stable
Environment
- Console
License
- OSI Approved :: MIT License
Natural Language
- English
Operating System
- OS Independent
- POSIX
Programming Language
- Python :: 3
- Python :: 3.10
- Python :: 3.11
- Python :: 3.12
- Python :: 3.13
Intended Audience
- Developers
- Information Technology
- Science/Research
- System Administrators
Topic
- Software Development :: Build Tools
- Software Development :: Testing
- Software Development :: Quality Assurance
- Scientific/Engineering
Define tasks in Python. Run only what changed.
doit is a task management & automation tool like make, but in pure Python. It tracks file dependencies, caches results, and skips tasks that are already up-to-date. No DSL, no YAML - just Python functions.
Quick Example
Create a dodo.py:
def task_hello():
"""create a greeting file"""
return {
'actions': ['echo "Hello from doit" > hello.txt'],
'targets': ['hello.txt'],
'clean': True,
}
def task_shout():
"""convert greeting to uppercase"""
return {
'actions': ['tr a-z A-Z < hello.txt > shout.txt'],
'file_dep': ['hello.txt'],
'targets': ['shout.txt'],
'clean': True,
}
Run it:
$ pip install doit
$ doit
. hello
. shout
$ doit # nothing to do - already up-to-date
-- hello
-- shout
Key Features
Incremental builds - tracks file dependencies and targets, re-runs only what changed
DAG execution - tasks run in correct dependency order
Python-native - tasks are plain Python dicts and functions, use any library
Parallel execution - run independent tasks concurrently (multiprocessing or threading)
Subtask generation - yield multiple tasks from a single function
Computed dependencies - calc_dep for dynamic dependency graphs
Plugin architecture - extensible commands, reporters, backends, and task loaders
Project Details
Website & docs - https://pydoit.org
Project management on github - https://github.com/pydoit/doit
Discussion group - https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/python-doit
X/twitter - https://x.com/pydoit
license
The MIT License Copyright (c) 2008-2026 Eduardo Naufel Schettino