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.

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
$ doit clean      # remove generated files
$ doit            # runs again
.  hello
.  shout

• 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

• 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

The MIT License Copyright (c) 2008-2026 Eduardo Naufel Schettino

see LICENSE file

Financial contributions on Open Collective