Python cannot install PyGObject

Question

I try install pygobject by pip

pip install --user PyGObject

but I doesn\'t work:

Collecting PyGObject
  Using cached pygob         


        

Answer 1

For 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-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.

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For ubuntu / Debian

Installing the system provided PyGObject:

1. Open a terminal
2. Execute sudo apt install 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

Installing from PyPI with pip:

1. Open a terminal and enter your virtual environment
2. Execute
   sudo apt install libgirepository1.0-dev gcc libcairo2-dev pkg-config python3-dev gir1.2-gtk-3.0
3. Execute pip3 install pycairo to build and install Pycairo
4. Execute pip3 install PyGObject to build and install PyGObject
5. Change the working directory to where your hello.py script can be found
6. Run python3 hello.py

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You can read more here

Answer 2

Upstream PyGObject just does not support this. See the PyGObject win32 project or the MSYS2 project to get it easily.

Answer 3

I'll just add what I've been using to make this work seamlessly in various projects.

It uses GNU Make, by providing a venv target one can use as a dependency to other targets to ensure a properly created virtual environment.

The venv target itself depends on a, albeit configurable, requirements.txt; the standard python requirements file.

A target test is include as an example of how one would use this.

The trick is to create a symlink to the installed system package. ln -s ${DIST_PACKAGES}/gi ${VENV_NAME}/lib/python${PYTHON_VER}/site-packages/gi, where $DIST_PACKAGE is the location of the python installed libraries on your system.

For those not familiar with make. Create a file named Makefile in the root of your project, copy the contents bellow, and issue the command make configure && make venv.

Makefile

# directory to store virtual environment
VENV_NAME=venv

# python runtime version
PYTHON_VER=3.6

# python executble
PYTHON=${VENV_NAME}/bin/python${PYTHON_VER}

# python local libraries location
DIST_PACKAGES=/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages

# pip requirements file
REQUIREMENTS=requirements.txt

configure:      ## Install required debian packages.
    sudo apt-get -y install python${PYTHON_VER} python3-pip libgirepository1.0-dev
    python3 -m pip install virtualenv pygobject
    make venv

venv:           ## Recreates the virtual environment if needed.
venv: $(VENV_NAME)/bin/activate
$(VENV_NAME)/bin/activate: ${REQUIREMENTS}
    test -d $(VENV_NAME) || virtualenv -p python${PYTHON_VER} $(VENV_NAME)
    ${PYTHON} -m pip install -U pip
    ${PYTHON} -m pip install -r ${REQUIREMENTS}
    ln -s ${DIST_PACKAGES}/gi ${VENV_NAME}/lib/python${PYTHON_VER}/site-packages/gi
    touch $@

test:           ## Runs the test suite.
test: venv
    $(PYTHON) -m pytest tests

Answer 4

Since February 2017, you can install pygobject directly through pip: pip install pygobject. It requires some packages to be installed though.

Before that, it took a while, but it was possible to install pygobject with pip, since this commit.

pygobject wasn't on pypi though, so you had to specify the git or tarball URL:

• git+https://git.gnome.org/browse/pygobject
• https://download.gnome.org/sources/pygobject/3.22/pygobject-3.22.0.tar.xz

The latter only works with pygobject 3.22+, which should have happenned around mid-september 2016. (3.21.1 should be the first pip-installable development release)