kicad_mmccoo
Kicad's pcbnew has a built in python engine for automating tasks. Unfortunately, this scripting interface is not documented anywhere that I've been able to find.
This is a repository to hold example and utility code in the hopes that others can learn to write their own scripts.
I have a companion blog
If you get nothing else out of this repository, take a look at this UML diagram. It doesn't contain all available APIs; just the ones needed to do common tasks (the spec from which it was generated is in the plantuml subdirectory)
plugins
This repo also contains a bunch of plugins, a description of which can be found in this youtube vide:
plugin install
For linux... create a directory in your homedir called .kicad_plugins Inside of that directory either clone this repo or link to a clone of it.
additional python packages are needed
# To get the dxf related plugins to work on linux systems, you'll need something like this:
# Make sure pip is available
sudo python2.7 -m ensurepip --default-pip
# or
sudo apt install python-pip
# then these
sudo pip2 install --upgrade pip
sudo pip2 install dxfgrabber
sudo pip2 install numpy
sudo pip2 install scipy
sudo pip2 install shapely