Getting Started

To get things started we will try to run a very simple GTK+ based GUI application using the PyGObject provided Python bindings. First create a small Python script called hello.py with the following content and save it somewhere:

import gi
gi.require_version("Gtk", "3.0")
from gi.repository import Gtk

window = Gtk.Window(title="Hello World")
window.show()
window.connect("destroy", Gtk.main_quit)
Gtk.main()

Before we can run the example application we need to install PyGObject, GTK+ and their dependencies. Follow the instructions for your platform below.

Ubuntu Fedora Arch Linux openSUSE
Windows macOS PyPI  

Windows

  1. Go to http://www.msys2.org/ and download the x86_64 installer
  2. Follow the instructions on the page for setting up the basic environment
  3. Run C:\msys64\mingw32.exe - a terminal window should pop up
  4. Execute pacman -Suy
  5. Execute pacman -S mingw-w64-i686-gtk3 mingw-w64-i686-python2-gobject mingw-w64-i686-python3-gobject
  6. To test that GTK+3 is working you can run gtk3-demo
  7. Copy the hello.py script you created to C:\msys64\home\<username>
  8. In the mingw32 terminal execute python3 hello.py - a window should appear.
_images/start_windows.png

Ubuntu / Debian

  1. Open a terminal
  2. Execute sudo apt install python-gi python-gi-cairo python3-gi python3-gi-cairo gir1.2-gtk-3.0
  3. Change the directory to where your hello.py script can be found (e.g. cd Desktop)
  4. Run python3 hello.py
_images/start_linux.png

Fedora

  1. Open a terminal
  2. Execute sudo dnf install pygobject3 python3-gobject gtk3
  3. Change the directory to where your hello.py script can be found (e.g. cd Desktop)
  4. Run python3 hello.py

Arch Linux

  1. Open a terminal
  2. Execute sudo pacman -S python-gobject python2-gobject gtk3
  3. Change the directory to where your hello.py script can be found (e.g. cd Desktop)
  4. Run python3 hello.py

openSUSE

  1. Open a terminal
  2. Execute sudo zypper install python-gobject python3-gobject gtk3
  3. Change the directory to where your hello.py script can be found (e.g. cd Desktop)
  4. Run python3 hello.py

macOS

  1. Go to https://brew.sh/ and install homebrew
  2. Open a terminal
  3. Execute brew install pygobject3 --with-python@2 gtk+3 to install for both python2 and python3
  4. Change the directory to where your hello.py script can be found (e.g. cd Desktop)
  5. Run python3 hello.py
_images/start_macos.png

From PyPI

PyGObject is also available on PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/PyGObject

For this approach you have to make sure that all runtime and build dependencies are present yourself as pip will only take care of pycairo.

virtualenv --python=python3 myvenv
source myvenv/bin/activate
pip install pygobject
python hello.py

For more details on how to use a virtualenv with PyGObject, see the “Creating a Development Environment” page.