---
id: smart-open
version: "8.0.1"
license: unclear
license_treatment: permissive
maintenance: active
---

# smart-open — Utils for streaming large files (S3, HDFS, GCS, SFTP, Azure Blob Storage, gzip, bz2, zst...)

License: permissive · Maintenance: active · Popularity: top 1,000 on PyPI

## Install

pip install smart-open
uv add smart-open
poetry add smart-open

## Description

# smart_open — utils for streaming large files in Python

[![License](https://img.shields.io/pypi/l/smart_open.svg)](https://github.com/piskvorky/smart_open/blob/master/LICENSE)
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[![Version](https://img.shields.io/pypi/v/smart-open.svg?logo=pypi&logoColor=white)](https://pypi.org/project/smart-open/)
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[![Downloads](https://pepy.tech/badge/smart-open/month)](https://pypistats.org/packages/smart-open)

## What?

`smart_open` is a Python 3 library for **efficient streaming of very large files** from/to storages such as S3, GCS, Azure Blob Storage, HDFS, WebHDFS, HTTP, HTTPS, SFTP, or local filesystem. It supports transparent, on-the-fly (de-)compression for a variety of different...

## AI interpretation — verify before relying

smart_open provides a unified, drop-in replacement for Python's built-in open() that streams large files efficiently from remote storage (S3, GCS, Azure, HDFS, SFTP, HTTP) and local filesystems, with transparent compression support.

Verdict: Production-ready streaming library with low install friction, active maintenance, and no known vulnerabilities. Permissive licensing and broad Python 3.10+ support make it suitable for data pipelines and cloud-native applications. Choose this if you need a clean, unified API for remote file access across multiple storage backends.

[View on SkillFed](https://skillfed.io/packages/smart-open) · [View on PyPI](https://pypi.org/project/smart-open/)