Installation

From PyPI

pip install libui

Pre-built wheels are published for Python 3.10 – 3.14 on macOS, Linux (manylinux) and Windows. The wheel bundles the compiled C extension and a statically linked libui-ng, so no compiler or system libraries are needed — just pip install and go.

If a wheel isn’t available for your platform, pip will fall back to building from the source distribution (see below).

From source

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/mosquito/libui-python.git
cd libui-python
pip install -e ".[dev]"

Build prerequisites

libui-python includes a C extension that wraps the libui-ng library. Building from source requires:

  • Python >= 3.10

  • A C/C++ compiler (gcc, clang, or MSVC)

  • Meson >= 1.0

  • Ninja

macOS

Xcode command-line tools provide everything except Meson/Ninja:

xcode-select --install
pip install meson ninja

The Cocoa framework is built-in — no extra libraries needed.

Linux

Install GTK+3 development headers and a compiler:

# Debian / Ubuntu
sudo apt install build-essential libgtk-3-dev
pip install meson ninja

# Fedora
sudo dnf install gcc gcc-c++ gtk3-devel
pip install meson ninja

# Arch
sudo pacman -S base-devel gtk3
pip install meson ninja

Windows

Install Visual Studio Build Tools (or full Visual Studio) with the “Desktop development with C++” workload. Then:

pip install meson ninja

The Win32 API is built-in — no extra libraries needed.

Verifying the installation

import libui
print(libui.core)  # <module 'libui.core' from '...'>