sherlock-project

Hunt down social media accounts by username across social networks

sherlock-project v0.16.0 113.8K downloads/30d#12,327 on PyPI★ 89,488

Permissive license MIT Active released 2025-09-16

What it is and what it does

Sherlock is a command-line tool that hunts for usernames across a large set of social networks and online platforms. You give it one or more usernames, and it queries each network to see if an account exists there, then reports back which sites have matches. It's built on requests and requests-futures for parallel lookups, with support for Tor routing, proxy configuration, and output to CSV or Excel.

The tool is designed for OSINT (open-source intelligence) and reconnaissance work—finding digital footprints of a person or identity across the internet. It runs on Python 3.9 through 3.13 and handles both single and batch username searches from the command line.

Use it for:

Verify whether a username is available across multiple platforms before registering a new account
Conduct OSINT investigations to map out all online accounts associated with a specific username
Batch-check a list of usernames to identify which social networks they're registered on
Export account discovery results to CSV or Excel for reporting or further analysis
Route searches through Tor or a proxy to maintain anonymity during reconnaissance

Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts on this page — verify before relying

Searches for usernames across 400+ social networks to identify and locate accounts associated with a given identity.

Yes, if you need to search for usernames across many social networks at once. The tool is actively maintained, has no known vulnerabilities, uses permissive MIT licensing, and low install friction. It's a solid fit for OSINT work or account verification workflows. Not necessary if you only need to check one or two specific platforms.

Install

sherlock-project on PyPI

pip

pip install sherlock-project

uv

uv add sherlock-project

poetry

poetry add sherlock-project

Installing sherlock-project

Before you install

Low friction install with a wheel distribution. Active maintenance with recent commits and a large community presence (89488 stars). Eight runtime dependencies are all well-established libraries, suggesting straightforward setup.

License in practice

MIT license is permissive and imposes minimal restrictions—you can use, modify, and distribute the package freely in both open-source and commercial contexts.

Quickstart

pip install sherlock-project
sherlock user123
sherlock user1 user2 user3 --csv

Verify before relying

Whether the 400+ social networks figure remains current or if the actual list varies by version
Whether Tor and proxy features work reliably across all supported platforms
Performance characteristics when searching for multiple users simultaneously

Package facts

License	MIT (permissive)
Python support	supports the current Python release (<4.0,>=3.9)
Install friction	low — pure-Python wheel
Runtime dependencies	8 — PySocks, certifi, colorama, openpyxl, pandas, requests, requests-futures, stem
Maintenance	actively maintained — 332 days since the last release
Last repo commit	2026-08-14
First released	2024-05-13
Downloads	113,849/month — #12,327 on PyPI (30-day window, as of 2026-08-14)
Known vulnerabilities	none known (OSV.dev, checked 2026-08-14)

Evidence: sherlock_project-0.16.0-py3-none-any.whl

Keywords: osint, reconnaissance, information gathering

Development Status :: 5 - Production/StableIntended Audience :: DevelopersIntended Audience :: Information TechnologyLicense :: OSI Approved :: MIT LicenseNatural Language :: EnglishOperating System :: OS IndependentProgramming Language :: Python :: 3Programming Language :: Python :: 3.10Programming Language :: Python :: 3.11Programming Language :: Python :: 3.12Programming Language :: Python :: 3.13Programming Language :: Python :: 3.9Topic :: Security