Installation¶

A pike installation failure.¶
Basic installation¶
Most users on Linux, macOS or Windows with x64 systems should use pip
to
install pikepdf in their current Python environment (such as your project’s
virtual environment).
pip install pikepdf
Use pip install --user pikepdf
to install the package for the current user
only. Use pip install pikepdf
to install to a virtual environment.
Linux users: If you have an older version of pip
, such as the one that ships
with Ubuntu 18.04, this command will attempt to compile the project instead of
installing the wheel. If you want to get the binary wheel, upgrade pip
with:
wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py && python3 get-pip.py
pip --version # should be 20.0 or newer
pip install pikepdf
32- and 64-bit wheels are available for Windows, Linux and macOS. Binary wheels should work on most systems, i.e. Linux distributions 2010 and newer, macOS 10.11 and newer (for Homebrew), Windows 7 and newer, provided a recent version of pip is used to install them. The Linux wheels currently include copies of libqpdf, libjpeg, and zlib. The Windows wheels include libqpdf. This is to ensure that up-to-date, compatible copies of dependent libraries are included.
Currently we do not build wheels for architectures other than x86 and x64.
Alpine Linux does not support Python wheels.
Platform support¶
Some platforms include versions of pikepdf that are distributed by the system
package manager (such as apt
). These versions may lag behind the version
distributed with PyPI, but may be convenient for users that cannot use binary
wheels.

Packaged fish.¶
Debian, Ubuntu and other APT-based distributions¶
apt install pikepdf
Installing on FreeBSD¶
pkg install py37-pikepdf
To attempt a manual install, try something like:
pkg install python3 py37-lxml py37-pip py37-pybind11 qpdf
pip install --user pikepdf
This procedure is known to work on FreeBSD 11.3, 12.0, 12.1-RELEASE and 13.0-CURRENT. It has not been tested on other versions.
Building from source¶
Requirements
pikepdf requires:
a C++14 compliant compiler - GCC (5 and up), clang (3.3 and up), MSVC (2015 or newer)
libqpdf 10.0.3 or higher from the QPDF project.
On Linux the library and headers for libqpdf must be installed because pikepdf compiles code against it and links to it.
Check Repology for QPDF to see if a recent version of QPDF is available for your platform. Otherwise you must build QPDF from source. (Consider using the binary wheels, which bundle the required version of libqpdf.)
Compiling with GCC or Clang
clone this repository
install libjpeg, zlib and libqpdf on your platform, including headers
pip install .
Note
pikepdf should be built with the same compiler and linker as libqpdf; to be
precise both must use the same C++ ABI. On some platforms, setup.py may
not pick the correct compiler so one may need to set environment variables
CC
and CXX
to redirect it. If the wrong compiler is selected,
import pikepdf._qpdf
will throw an ImportError
about a missing
symbol.
On Windows (requires Visual Studio 2015)
pikepdf requires a C++14 compliant compiler (i.e. Visual Studio 2015 on
Windows). See our continuous integration build script in .appveyor.yml
for detailed and current instructions. Or use the wheels which save this pain.
These instructions require the precompiled binary qpdf.dll
. See the QPDF
documentation if you also need to build this DLL from source. Both should be
built with the same compiler. You may not mix and match MinGW and Visual C++
for example.
Running a regular pip install
command will detect the
version of the compiler used to build Python and attempt to build the
extension with it. We must force the use of Visual Studio 2015.
Clone this repository.
In a command prompt, run:
%VS140COMNTOOLS%\..\..\VC\vcvarsall.bat" x64 set DISTUTILS_USE_SDK=1 set MSSdk=1
Download qpdf-10.0.3-bin-msvc64.zip from the QPDF releases page.
Extract
bin\*.dll
(all the DLLs, both QPDF’s and the Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime library) from the zip file above, and copy it to thesrc/pikepdf
folder in the repository.Run
pip install .
in the root directory of the repository.
Note
The user compiling pikepdf
to must have registry editing rights on the
machine to be able to run the vcvarsall.bat
script.
Building against a QPDF source tree
Follow these steps to build pikepdf against a different version of QPDF, rather than the one provided with your operating system. This may be useful if you need a more recent version of QPDF than your operating system package manager provides, and you do not want to use Python wheels.
Set the environment variable
QPDF_SOURCE_TREE
to the location of the QPDF source tree.Build QPDF, by running
make
. Refer to the QPDF installation instructions for further options and details.On Linux, modify
LD_LIBRARY_PATH
, prepending the path where the QPDF build produceslibqpdfXX.so
. This might be something like$QPDF_SOURCE_TREE/.build/libs/libqpdfXX.so
. On macOS, locate the equivalent variable isDYLD_LIBRARY_PATH
. On Windows, no action is needed. Generally, what you are doing here is telling the runtime dynamic linker to use the custom compiled version of QPDF instead of the system version.Build pikepdf. On Windows, locate the QPDF .dll files and copy them into the folder alongside the file named
_qpdf*.dll
.
Note that the Python wheels for pikepdf currently compile their own version of QPDF and several of its dependencies to ensure the wheels have the latest version. You can also refer to the Azure Pipelines CI YAML files for build steps.
Building against a custom install of QPDF to /usr/local/lib
If you have previously installed a QPDF from source to /usr/local/lib
on
a POSIX platform, and you try to build pikepdf from source, it will prefer the
operating system version of QPDF installed at /usr/lib
. Since pikepdf strongly
prefers recent versions of QPDF, you may want to use a more current version.
From a Git checkout of the pikepdf source tree, run:
env LDFLAGS='-L/usr/local/lib' CFLAGS='-I/usr/local/include/qpdf' pip install .
Building the documentation¶
Documentation is generated using Sphinx and you are currently reading it. To regenerate it:
pip install -r requirements/docs.txt
cd docs
make html