Systematic and automatic calculations of the electronic band structure are a crucial component of computationally-driven high-throughput materials screening. An algorithm, for any crystal, to derive a unique description of the crystal structure together with a recommended band path is indispensable for this task. The electronic band structure is typically sampled along a path within the first Brillouin zone including the surface in reciprocal space. Some points in reciprocal space have higher site symmetries and/or have higher constraints than other points regarding the electronic band structure and therefore are likely to be more important than other points. This work categorizes 2 points in reciprocal space according to their symmetry and provides recommended band paths that cover all special wavevector ( k -vector) points and lines necessarily and sufficiently. Points in reciprocal space are labeled such that there is no conflict with the crystallographic convention. The k -vector coefficients of labeled points, which are located at Brillouin zone face and edge centers as well as vertices, are derived based on a primitive cell compatible with the crystallographic convention, including those with axial ratio-dependent coordinates. Furthermore, we provide an open-source implementation of the algorithms within our SeeK-path python code, to allow researchers to obtain k -vector coefficients and recommended band paths in an automated fashion. Finally, we created a free online service to compute and visualise Brillouin Zone, labeled k -points and suggested band paths for any crystal structure, that we made available at http://www.materialscloud.org/tools/seekpath/ .