Computer Installation

Note

installation via pip typically requires internet access

RobotPy requires Python 3.6/3.7/3.8/3.9 to be installed on your computer. It is highly recommended to install a 64-bit version of Python.

• Python for Windows

• Python for macOS

Once you have installed Python, see below for operating system specific notes on installing via pip.

Install via pip on Windows

Warning

On Windows, the Visual Studio 2019 redistributable package is required to be installed.

Run the following command from cmd or Powershell to install the core RobotPy packages:

py -3 -m pip install robotpy

See also

This command only installs the core RobotPy packages. See additional details for installing optional/vendor components

To upgrade, you can run this:

py -3 -m pip install --upgrade robotpy

If you don’t have administrative rights on your computer, either use virtualenv/virtualenvwrapper-win, or or you can install to the user site-packages directory:

py -3 -m pip install --user robotpy

Install via pip on macOS

Warning

Due to WPILib dependencies, RobotPy only supports non-ARM OSX 10.14+

On a macOS system that has pip installed, just run the following command from the Terminal application (may require admin rights):

pip3 install robotpy

See also

This command only installs the core RobotPy packages. See additional details for installing optional/vendor components

To upgrade, you can run this:

pip3 install --upgrade robotpy

If you don’t have administrative rights on your computer, either use virtualenv/virtualenvwrapper, or or you can install to the user site-packages directory:

pip3 install --user robotpy

Install via pip on Linux

Since 2021, RobotPy distributes manylinux binary wheels on PyPI. However, installing these requires a distro that has glibc 2.27 or newer, and an installer that implements PEP 600, such as pip 20.3 or newer. You can check your version of pip with the following command:

pip3 --version

If you need to upgrade your version of pip, it is highly recommended to use a virtual environment.

If you have a compatible version of pip, you can simply run:

pip3 install robotpy

See also

This command only installs the core RobotPy packages. See additional details for installing optional/vendor components

To upgrade, you can run this:

pip3 install --upgrade robotpy

The following Linux distributions are known to work, but this list is not necessarily comprehensive:

• Ubuntu 18.04+

• Fedora 31+

• Arch Linux

If you manage to install the packages and get the following error or something similar, your system is most likely not compatible with RobotPy:

OSError: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.22' not found (required by /usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/wpiutil/lib/libwpiutil.so)

source install

Alternatively, if you have a C++17 compiler installed, you may be able to use pip to install RobotPy from source.

Warning

It may take a very long time to install!

Warning

Mixing our pre-built wheels with source installs may cause runtime errors. This is due to internal ABI incompatibility between compiler versions.

Our wheels are built on Ubuntu 18.04 with GCC 7.

If you need to build with a specific compiler version, you can specify them using the CC and CXX environment variables:

export CC=gcc-7 CXX=g++-7

Manual install (without pip)

While this is possible to do, due to the large number of dependencies this is not recommended nor is it supported.