Peewee is a Python Object Relational Mapping (ORM) library which was developed by a U.S. based software engineer Charles Leifer in October 2010. Its latest version is 3.13.3. Peewee supports SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Cockroach databases.

Object Relational Mapping is a programming technique for converting data between incompatible type systems in object-oriented programming languages.

Class as defined in an Object Oriented (OO) programming language such as Python, is considered as non-scalar. It cannot be expressed as primitive types such as integers and strings.

On the other hand, databases like Oracle, MySQL, SQLite and others can only store and manipulate scalar values such as integers and strings organised within tables.

The programmer must either convert the object values into groups of scalar data types for storage in the database or convert them back upon retrieval, or only use simple scalar values within the program.

In an ORM system, each class maps to a table in the underlying database. Instead of writing tedious database interfacing code yourself, an ORM takes care of these issues, while you can focus on programming the logics of the system.

Environment setup

To install latest version of Peewee as hosted on PyPI (Python Package Index), use pip installer.

pip3 install peewee

There are no other dependencies for Peewee to work. It works with SQLite without installing any other package as sqlite3 module is bundled with standard library.

However, to work with MySQL and PostgreSQL, you may have to install DB-API compatible driver modules pymysql and pyscopg2 respectively. Cockroach database is handled through playhouse extension that is installed by default along with Peewee.

Peewee is an open source project hosted on https://github.com/coleifer/peewee repository. Hence, it can be installed from here by using git.

git clone https://github.com/coleifer/peewee.git
cd peewee
python setup.py install