pychallonge

May 28, 2026 ยท View on GitHub

Lightweight Python wrapper for the Challonge API. The pychallonge module was created by Russ Amos and maintained by George Lemanis

Python version support

  • 3.10 or later

Installation

The pychallonge package is available on PyPI and you can install it through your favorite package manager:

pip install pychallonge

Usage

from challonge import Client

# Create a client with your Challonge API credentials.
client = Client(user="your_challonge_username", api_key="your_api_key")

# Retrieve a tournament by its id (or its url).
tournament = client.tournaments.show(3272)

# Tournaments, matches, and participants are returned as typed dataclasses.
print(tournament.id)          # 3272
print(tournament.name)        # My Awesome Tournament
print(tournament.started_at)  # None

# Retrieve the participants for a given tournament.
participants = client.participants.index(tournament.id)
print(len(participants))  # 13

# Mutations (POST/PUT) return the updated resource directly.
tournament = client.tournaments.start(tournament.id)
print(tournament.started_at)  # 2011-07-31 16:16:02-04:00

# Close the client when done, or use it as a context manager.
client.close()

Context manager

with Client(user="your_challonge_username", api_key="your_api_key") as client:
    tournament = client.tournaments.show(3272)

Async

from challonge import AsyncClient

async with AsyncClient(user="your_challonge_username", api_key="your_api_key") as client:
    tournament = await client.tournaments.show(3272)
    participants = await client.participants.index(tournament.id)

Timezone

By default datetime fields are normalised to your machine's local timezone. Pass a timezone string to override:

client = Client(user="your_challonge_username", api_key="your_api_key", timezone="UTC")

See challonge.com for full API documentation.

API Issues

The Challonge API has some issues with the attachments endpoints. When uploading an attachment with a file (asset), the API returns a 500 internal server error. This issue has been reported to Challonge.

The check-in undo endpoint has unexpected behaviour: the checked_in field in the API response remains True even after a successful undo. The participant is correctly marked as not checked in on the website.

Running the tests

Tests make real API calls and require a Challonge account. Set CHALLONGE_USER and CHALLONGE_KEY in your environment before running.

$ git clone https://github.com/ZEDGR/pychallonge
$ cd pychallonge
$ CHALLONGE_USER=my_user CHALLONGE_KEY=my_api_key uv run pytest tests.py -v

Note that several tournaments are created and destroyed over the course of the tests. If any test fails mid-run, orphaned tournaments can be cleaned up as follows:

from challonge import Client

with Client(user="my_user", api_key="my_api_key") as client:
    for t in client.tournaments.index():
        if t.name.startswith("pychal"):
            client.tournaments.destroy(t.id)