Pandas dataframe get first row of each group

>>> df.groupby('id').first()
     value
id        
1    first
2    first
3    first
4   second
5    first
6    first
7   fourth

If you need id as column:

>>> df.groupby('id').first().reset_index()
   id   value
0   1   first
1   2   first
2   3   first
3   4  second
4   5   first
5   6   first
6   7  fourth

To get n first records, you can use head():

>>> df.groupby('id').head(2).reset_index(drop=True)
    id   value
0    1   first
1    1  second
2    2   first
3    2  second
4    3   first
5    3   third
6    4  second
7    4   fifth
8    5   first
9    6   first
10   6  second
11   7  fourth
12   7   fifth