Install woob with Homebrew, pacman

Project links

• Homepage

Commands and aliases

• woob

Project history

Woob descends from Weboob, a long-running project by Romain Bignon and contributors. The project history is visible in the official documentation copyright line, which dates the project lineage from 2010, and in the old mailing-list references retained on the Woob website. The project kept the original idea of turning website scraping and form workflows into typed, reusable backends while moving stewardship and source hosting into the modern GitLab project at gitlab.com/woob/woob.

A major transition happened with Woob 3.0, released on 2021-04-11. The official GitLab release says the project was now named woob, that the old individual applications such as boobank and boobill were replaced by a single launcher named `woob`, and that the project was now hosted on GitLab. That release also explicitly records the general changelog items 'Rename weboob to woob' and 'Create a single new launcher (woob) instead of many applications.'

The current project website continues that post-rename identity. It describes woob as a collection of applications able to interact with websites without requiring the user to open them in a browser, and as a provider of well-defined APIs for websites lacking official APIs. The site also links to the GitLab project, the API documentation at woob.dev, a modules catalog, and a set of user-facing applications.

Adoption history

Woob has never been a mass-market end-user package, but it has durable adoption in automation-heavy niches because it solves a real maintenance problem: website interfaces change, while users and downstream scripts want stable objects such as accounts, transactions, documents, videos, recipes, and housing listings. The official homepage advertises continuous integration as a way to notify developers when websites change and an update system for quickly pushing module fixes to users.

The project also has organizational links beyond hobby use. The Woob homepage lists organizations including Powens, Cozy Cloud, Geneanet, and Winancial, and presents professional usage through Powens. That gives the project a notable place in the French open-source web-scraping and account-aggregation ecosystem, even when individual Homebrew users mostly encounter it as a CLI/library package.

How it is used

A typical user installs woob, configures one or more backends under the user configuration directory, and then runs `woob` subcommands for tasks such as banking, bills, videos, recipes, housing, or other supported capabilities. Developers can import the Python library, load backends for a capability, and iterate over normalized objects such as accounts from multiple sites.

The usage pattern is backend-centric. The documentation's examples show a `Woob()` instance loading backends for capabilities such as `CapBank` or `CapVideo`, then calling methods that aggregate results across configured sites. This makes Woob more like a local integration framework than a single-purpose scraper.

Why package nerds care

For package maintainers and CLI users, Woob is interesting because it bundles a large moving target of website modules behind a stable executable and Python API. It also embodies the classic Unix-ish preference for scriptable local automation over browser-only workflows, while still carrying the operational burden of credentials, anti-bot changes, and site-specific breakage.

The 3.0 consolidation into one `woob` launcher matters in packaging terms: instead of shipping many old application commands, distributions can expose a single executable whose subcommands address the historical application set.

Timeline

• 2010: Project lineage begins under the original Weboob name, according to the official documentation copyright line.
• 2021-04-11: Woob 3.0 is released; the project is renamed from Weboob to Woob, moves to GitLab, and replaces multiple application commands with a single `woob` launcher.
• 2024-10-29: Woob 3.7 is advertised on the official homepage as the current stable release, with the project still actively maintained.

Related projects

• Weboob is the original name and project identity from which Woob directly descends.
• Powens is linked from the official Woob homepage as the route for professional usage.
• The project overlaps conceptually with site-specific scrapers, account aggregators, and personal finance import tools, but distinguishes itself through reusable capabilities and modules.

Sources

• https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/25520182/releases/3.0
• https://woob.dev/
• https://woob.tech/