This is a collection of tricks, tools, libraries, APIs and data sources for creative projects. It's a reference as well as a compendium of things you can do in the browser and the command line.

Although this is a list of mostly Github-hosted tools, it's different from awesome-* lists in that I try to avoid having several things with overlapping purposes and only include what I consider to be the excellent ones: tools that are easy to install, elegant to work with, and well documented — plus some quirky outliers for good fun.

I've been inspired to keep this list, and name it as such, by javierarce/toolbox, which serves a similar purpose and contains great resources that I recommend you check out.

Contributions to this list are welcome via issues and pull requests — I'm always looking for new ideas!

Thanks for stopping by. ✌️

• JavaScript libraries
  • Image processing, OCR
  • Drawing, illustration, motion
  • Data visualization
  • 3D, Virtual Reality
  • Audio
  • User Interfaces
  • Mapping
  • Gamemaking
  • Working with documents
  • Algorithms, data structures
  • App Architecture
  • Prototyping
  • Web scraping, data extraction
  • Language processing
  • Machine Learning
  • Parsing things
  • Building CLIs
  • Running a server
• Data sets
  • Language
  • Geographical data
  • Miscellaneous datasets
• APIs
• Command-line tools
• Online tools
• Miscellaneous tips & tricks
  • Start a server for a folder
  • Fetch a file from the web
  • Make an S3 bucket publicly available
  • wget for website mirroring / scraping
• Cheatsheets & recipes
  • ffmpeg
  • wget
  • Unix command-line tools
  • MySQL queries
  • Adobe Products
• Other lists

(The ★ star denotes popular, high-quality, choices.)

• awesome-webaudio
• web-audio-resources

This section contains tools that make it easier to just start working on your thing without a lot of setup.

* esprima is one of the more mature ECMAScript parsers.

I don't have much experience here; in the interim, the most popular Node frameworks for running a server:

Run python -m SimpleHTTPServer in your project folder to make it available at http://localhost:8000.

Note: The syntax above is for the Python 2.x that comes preinstalled with macOS and Linux. The equivalent syntax for Python 3 is python -m http.server.

If you're using Node.js, you can also use the serve package, which you can run without installing with npx (it comes with recent versions of npm):

npx serve

An even simpler server is servor:

npx servor

Also take a look at budo.

To fetch a file from the web with the command line, using wget is straightforward:

wget http://download.geofabrik.de/europe/romania-latest.osm.pbf

👉 See more wget tricks

Or, fetching a file in Node:

require('http').get('http://download.geofabrik.de/europe/romania-latest.osm.pbf', function(response) {
    response.pipe(require('fs').createWriteStream('romania-latest.osm.pbf'));
});

To use a S3 bucket to keep a bunch of files and make them publicly available, you need to make a bucket policy. This is under Permissions section on the Properties tab for your bucket. Paste this into the bucket policy (myBucketName should be the name of your bucket):

{
	"Version": "2012-10-17",
	"Statement": [
		{
			"Sid": "PublicReadGetObject",
			"Effect": "Allow",
			"Principal": "*",
			"Action": "s3:GetObject",
			"Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::myBucketName/*"
		}
	]
}

All the files inside will typically be available at http://myBucketName.s3.amazonaws.com/path/to/file but you can grab the exact URL from the Static Website Hosting section in the Properties tab.

Extra credit: This is super-useful for hosting video files, since S3 supports partial content requests which is needed to loop <video> on your web pages.

See the list of recipes

See the list of recipes

The standard command-line tools available on Unix-based systems are wonderful, if occasionally inscrutable. This page contains some commands I found useful.

See the list of recipes

Some useful tricks for working with data from MySQL tables.

See the list of recipes

See the list of recipes

• A few good open-source typefaces

• awesome-creative-coding