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Installation on Windows

Beginning with 1.9.1 we provide wheels for Kivy and all its dependencies to be used with an existing Python installation. We also provide nightly wheels from Kivy master. See also upgrade-win-dist.

Note

This page represents instructions for wheels starting with 1.9.1. Until 1.9.1 is released the nightly wheels have to be used because stable kivy wheels have not been uploaded to pypi yet.

Warning

Python 3.5 is currently not supported on Windows due to issues with MinGW and Python 3.5.

What are wheels, pip and wheel

To install Kivy wheels, Python first needs to be installed. Multiple versions of Python can be installed side by side.

In Python, packages such as Kivy can be installed with the python package manager, pip. Some packages such as Kivy require additional steps, such as compilation, when installing using the Kivy source code with pip. Wheels (with a .whl extension) are pre-built distributions of a package that has already been compiled and do not require additional steps to install.

When hosted on pypi one installs a wheel using pip, e.g. python -m pip install kivy. When downloading and installing a wheel directly, python -m pip install wheel_file_name is used, such as:

python -m pip install C:\Kivy-1.9.1.dev-cp27-none-win_amd64.whl

Kivy’s dependencies

We offer wheels for Kivy and its dependencies separately so only desired dependencies need be installed. The dependencies are offered as namespace packages of Kivy.deps, e.g. kivy.deps.sdl2.

Currently on Windows, we provide the following dependency wheels: gstreamer for audio and video and glew and sdl2 for graphics and control. gstreamer is an optional dependency which only needs to be installed if video display is desired.

Command line

Know your command line. To execute any of the pip or wheel commands, one needs a command line tool with python on the path. The default command line on Windows is CMD, but we recommend Git for Windows which offers a bash command line as well as git. Note, CMD can still be used even if bash is installed.

Walking the path! To add your python to the path, simply open your command line and then us the cd command to change the current directory to where python is installed, e.g. cd C:\Python27. Alternatively if you only have one python version installed, permanently add the python directory to the path for CMD for bash.

Installation

Now that python is available on the command line, which can checked by typing python --version, do the following to install.

  1. Ensure you have the latest pip and wheel:

    python -m pip install --upgrade pip wheel setuptools
    
  2. Install the dependencies (skip gstreamer (~90MB) if not needed):

    python -m pip install docutils pygments pypiwin32 kivy.deps.sdl2 kivy.deps.glew \
    kivy.deps.gstreamer --extra-index-url http://kivy.org/downloads/packages/simple/ \
    --trusted-host kivy.org
    
  3. Install kivy:

    python -m pip install kivy
    

That’s it. You should now be able to import kivy in your python.

Nightly wheel installation

Warning

Using the latest development version can be risky and you might encounter issues during development. If you encounter any bugs, please report them.

Snapshot wheels of current Kivy master are created every night. They can be found here. To use them, instead of doing python -m pip install kivy we’ll install one of these wheels as follows.

  1. Perform steps 1 and 2 of the above Installation section.
  2. Download the appropriate wheel for your system.
  3. Rename the wheel to remove the version tag, e.g. Kivy-1.9.1.dev0_30112015_gitc68b630-cp27-none-win32.whl should be renamed to Kivy-1.9.1.dev0-cp27-none-win32.whl.
  4. Install it with python -m pip install wheel-name where wheel-name is the name of the renamed file.

Use development Kivy

Warning

Using the latest development version can be risky and you might encounter issues during development. If you encounter any bugs, please report them.

To compile and install kivy using the kivy source code or to use kivy with git rather than a wheel there are some additional steps:

  1. Both the python and the Python\Scripts directories must be on the path They must be on the path every time you recompile kivy.

  2. Ensure you have the latest pip and wheel with:

    python -m pip install --upgrade pip wheel setuptools
    
  3. Create the python\Lib\distutils\distutils.cfg file and add the two lines:

    [build]
    compiler = mingw32
    
  4. Install MinGW with:

    python -m pip install -i https://pypi.anaconda.org/carlkl/simple mingwpy
    
  5. Set the environment variables. On windows do:

    set USE_SDL2=1
    set USE_GSTREAMER=1
    

    In bash do:

    export USE_SDL2=1
    export USE_GSTREAMER=1
    

    These variables must be set everytime you recompile kivy.

  6. Install the other dependencies as well as their dev versions (you can skip gstreamer and gstreamer_dev if you aren’t going to use video/audio):

    python -m pip install cython docutils pygments pypiwin32 kivy.deps.sdl2 \
    kivy.deps.glew kivy.deps.gstreamer kivy.deps.glew_dev kivy.deps.sdl2_dev \
    kivy.deps.gstreamer_dev --extra-index-url http://kivy.org/downloads/packages/simple/ --trusted-host kivy.org
    
  7. If you downloaded or cloned kivy to an alternate location and don’t want to install it to site-packages read the next section.

  8. Finally compile and install kivy with pip install filename, where filename can be a url such as https://github.com/kivy/kivy/archive/deps.zip for kivy master, or the full path to a local copy of a kivy zip.

Installing Kivy to an alternate location

In development Kivy is often installed to an alternate location and then installed with python -m pip install -e location, which allows it to remain in its original location while being available to python. In that case extra tweaking is required. Due to a issue wheel and pip install the dependency wheels to python\Lib\site-packages\kivy. So they need to be moved to your actual kivy installation.

After installing the kivy dependencies and downloading or cloning kivy to your favorite location, do the following:

  1. Move the contents of python\Lib\site-packages\kivy\deps to your-path\kivy\deps where your-path is the path where your kivy is located.
  2. Remove the python\Lib\site-packages\kivy directory altogether.
  3. From python\Lib\site-packages move all the kivy.deps.*.pth files and all kivy.deps.*.dist-info` directories to ``your-path right next to kivy.

Now you can safely compile kivy in its current location with make or python -m pip install -e location or just python setup.py build_ext --inplace.

Making Python available anywhere

There are two methods for launching python on your *.py files.

Double-click method

If you only have one Python installed, you can associate all *.py files with your python, if it isn’t already, and then run it by double clicking. Or you can only do it once if you want to be able to choose each time:

  1. Right click on the Python file (.py file extension) of the application you want to launch
  2. From the context menu that appears, select Open With
  3. Browse your hard disk drive and find the file python.exe that you want to use. Select it.
  4. Select “Always open the file with...” if you don’t want to repeat this procedure every time you double click a .py file.
  5. You are done. Open the file.

Send-to method

You can launch a .py file with our Python using the Send-to menu:

  1. Browse to the python.exe file you want to use. Right click on it and copy it.
  2. Open Windows explorer (File explorer in Windows 8), and to go the address ‘shell:sendto’. You should get the special Windows directory SendTo
  3. Paste the previously copied python.exe file as a shortcut.

#. Rename it to python <python-version>. E.g. python27-x64 You can now execute your application by right clicking on the .py file -> “Send To” -> “python <python-version>”.

Upgrading from a previous Kivy dist

To install the new wheels to a previous Kivy distribution all the files and folders, except for the python folder should be deleted from the distribution. This python folder will then be treated as a normal system installed python and all the steps described in Installation can then be continued.