🐍 Brownie - Dead Python Framework That We All Loved

Finally, Smart Contracts Without JavaScript

Back in 2019, if you wanted to do smart contract development, you had two choices: learn JavaScript and use Truffle (which was slow as shit), or... learn JavaScript and use Truffle. That's it. If you were a Python dev, you were fucked.

Then Brownie showed up and suddenly we could write smart contracts without touching Node.js. Thank fucking god.

It supported both Solidity and Vyper contracts, which was huge since most tools only gave a shit about Solidity. Built on web3.py, so if you already knew Python blockchain dev, you were home free.

The framework was maintained by Ben Hauser and the eth-brownie GitHub organization, which had a decent community of Python developers who were tired of JavaScript tooling.

What Made It Not Suck

Brownie used pytest for testing, which meant you could actually debug your smart contracts without wanting to throw your laptop out the window. The trace-based coverage was legit - you could see exactly which lines of your Solidity code got hit during tests, no guessing involved.

The hypothesis integration for property-based testing was chef's kiss. While JavaScript devs were manually writing edge case tests, we were generating thousands of test cases automatically using stateful testing strategies.

When your transaction failed, instead of getting some cryptic hex bullshit, you'd get an actual Python stack trace pointing to exactly what went wrong. The built-in console (brownie console) was perfect for poking around and testing shit interactively.

💀 How It All Went to Hell

2024 was the year everything went to hell. PyPI page suddenly had this lovely message: "Brownie is no longer actively maintained. Future releases may come sporadically - or never at all."

Great. Thanks for the heads up, guys.

Version 1.21.0 dropped in May 2024 - probably their "fuck it, we're done" release. Meanwhile, Foundry grabbed 51.1% market share while Hardhat held 32.9%. Python frameworks? We got basically nothing. The community decided Rust and JavaScript were the future, and Python could go die in a corner.

Where the Fuck Do We Go Now?

The Brownie team basically said "use Ape Framework" and called it a day. ApeWorX put together migration guides because they knew thousands of us were about to be completely fucked.

But here's the brutal truth: most teams just said "screw Python" and migrated to Foundry or Hardhat. Why? Because Foundry is 5-6x faster and the rest of the ecosystem moved on without us.

I migrated a DeFi project from Brownie to Foundry in 2024. The performance difference was insane - tests that took 2 minutes in Brownie ran in 20 seconds. But rewriting 3000 lines of Python tests in Solidity? That was 2 weeks of pure hell.

The writing was on the wall when ConsenSys sunset Truffle and Ganache in 2023, signaling the end of the old Python-friendly ecosystem.

The Installation Dance of Death

Getting Brownie running was already a pain in the ass. You needed Python 3.10+ and python3-dev, plus either Hardhat or Ganache running in the background. The "simple" install was:

pipx install eth-brownie

Except it was never fucking simple. Half the time you'd get some obscure dependency conflict because web3.py wanted one version of something and brownie wanted another. I spent more time debugging Python virtual environments than actually writing smart contracts.

The docs said to use Ganache 7.9.2, but then ConsenSys killed Ganache so you had to switch to Hardhat anyway. Every few months, something in the dependency chain would break and you'd be stuck troubleshooting instead of shipping code.

The Directory Structure (That Actually Made Sense)

One thing Brownie got right was the project layout:

my-project/
├── contracts/          # Your Solidity/Vyper contracts
├── interfaces/         # Contract interfaces (actually useful)
├── scripts/           # Deploy scripts that didn't suck
├── tests/             # pytest tests (the good part)
├── build/             # Compiled artifacts
└── brownie-config.yaml # Configuration hell

Workflow was straightforward: brownie init, brownie compile, brownie test. The console (brownie console) was perfect for testing random shit without writing full scripts. You could deploy, poke contracts, check balances - all from a Python REPL.

Except when brownie compile randomly failed because your Solidity version changed and brownie-config.yaml had the wrong pragma. Or when brownie test crashed because some pytest plugin conflicted with brownie's custom fixtures. Good times.

Testing That Didn't Make You Want to Die

The testing was honestly Brownie's killer feature. Trace-based coverage meant you could see exactly which lines of Solidity got hit. No guessing, no "I think this test covers that edge case" - you knew.

Property-based testing with hypothesis was insane. You'd write one test and it would generate hundreds of edge cases automatically. Found bugs I never would have caught manually.

When shit broke, you got actual Python stack traces instead of 0x08c379a000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000. Revolutionary fucking concept: error messages you could actually read without a hex decoder.

I remember debugging a reentrancy bug at 2 AM using brownie's transaction trace. Showed me the exact call stack, gas usage, state changes. Took 10 minutes to find what would have been hours in Remix.

🐍 Why Python Ecosystem Integration Was Sick

The best part about Brownie was using pandas to analyze your contract's gas usage, or numpy to generate test data for your AMM curve tests. You could import whatever Python library you needed - requests for API calls, scipy for math, matplotlib for plotting token price curves.

MythX integration meant you could run security scans right from your test suite. Caught a stupid approval race condition bug that could have been a $50M exploit. Thanks, Brownie.

CI/CD with Python was painless. GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, whatever - if it could run Python, it could run Brownie tests.

⚡ Where It All Went Wrong

Performance was fucking terrible compared to Foundry. Compilation took forever. Tests were slow. The Python overhead was real - what Foundry did in 20 seconds took Brownie 2+ minutes.

Dependency hell got worse every month. web3.py would update, break something, and you'd spend half a day tracking down which version worked. Python 3.11 came out and suddenly nothing worked. Python 3.12 made it worse.

CI was a nightmare once your test suite got big. Had a DeFi protocol with 500+ tests that took 45 minutes to run in GitHub Actions. Same tests in Foundry? 3 minutes.