Eel

Eel is a little Python library for making simple Electron-like offline HTML/JS GUI apps, with full access to Python capabilities and libraries.

Eel hosts a local webserver, then lets you annotate functions in Python so that they can be called from Javascript, and vice versa.

Eel is designed to take the hassle out of writing short and simple GUI applications. If you are familiar with Python and web development, probably just jump to this example which picks random file names out of the given folder (something that is impossible from a browser).

Intro

There are several options for making GUI apps in Python, but if you want to use HTML/JS (in order to use jQueryUI or Bootstrap, for example) then you generally have to write a lot of boilerplate code to communicate from the Client (Javascript) side to the Server (Python) side.

The closest Python equivalent to Electron (to my knowledge) is cefpython. It is a bit heavy weight for what I wanted.

Eel is not as fully-fledged as Electron or cefpython - it is probably not suitable for making full blown applications like Atom - but it is very suitable for making the GUI equivalent of little utility scripts that you use internally in your team.

For some reason many of the best-in-class number crunching and maths libraries are in Python (Tensorflow, Numpy, Scipy etc) but many of the best visualization libraries are in Javascript (D3, THREE.js etc). Hopefully Eel makes it easy to combine these into simple utility apps for assisting your development.

Join Eel’s users and maintainers on Discord, if you like.

Install

Install from pypi with pip:

pip install eel

Shell

To include support for HTML templating, currently using Jinja2:

pip install eel[jinja2]

Shell

Usage

Directory Structure

An Eel application will be split into a frontend consisting of various web-technology files (.html, .js, .css) and a backend consisting of various Python scripts.

All the frontend files should be put in a single directory (they can be further divided into folders inside this if necessary).

#gui #html #js #html/js #gui #python