Peewee

Peewee (source code) is a object-relational mapper (ORM) implementation for bridging data stored in relational database tables with Python objects.

Peewee logo.

What makes Peewee a useful ORM?

Peewee can be an easier library to wrap your head around than SQLAlchemy and other ORMs. It is designed to be easier to hack on and understand, similar to how Bottle is a smaller, one-file web framework compared to the comprehensive Django framework. If you are just getting started with web development, it may be worth using Peewee for your database mapping and operations, especially if you use a microframework such as Flask or Bottle.

Peewee can be used with pretty much any web framework (although using it with Django would currently be complicated due to its tight built-in ORM coupling) or without a web framework. In the latter case Peewee is good for pulling data out of a relational database in a script or Jupyter notebook.

Any of the common relational database backends such as PostgreSQL, MySQL or SQLite are supported, although a database driver is still required. The chart below shows a few example configurations that could use Peewee as an ORM.

Example Peewee configurations with different web frameworks.

Peewee is an implementation of the object-relational mapping (ORM) concept. Learn more in the data chapter or view all topics.

How does Peewee compare to other Python ORMs?

The analogy used by the core Peewee author is that Peewee is to SQLAlchemy as SQLite is to PostgreSQL. An ORM does not have to work for every exhaustive use case in order to be useful.

Peewee resources

Peewee is a much newer library than several other Python ORMs. For example, Peewee's first public commit was in 2010, compared to 2005 for SQLAlchemy. The project is still over five years old though and matured substantially in development during that time. However, there are typically less resources and examples available to demonstrate how to use Peewee in your projects than some other ORMs that have been around for a longer period of time.

Many of the best resources come from the project's author, Charles Leifer, on his blog and on the official site. There are also hundreds of questions answered on the Stack Overflow peewee tag, so as usual that can be a rich source of examples for your Peewee-powered Python applications.

What would you like to learn about building Python web apps?

Tell me about standard relational databases.

What're these NoSQL data stores hipster developers keep talking about?

I want to know about working with data in Python.


Matt Makai 2012-2022