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Installation on OS X

Using The Kivy.app

Note

This method has only been tested on OS X 10.7 and above (64-bit). For versions prior to 10.7 or 10.7 32-bit, you have to install the components yourself. We suggest using homebrew to do that.

For OS X 10.7 and later, we provide a Kivy.app with all dependencies bundled. Download it from our Download Page. It comes as a .7z file that contains:

  • Kivy.app

To install Kivy, you must:

  1. Download the latest version from http://kivy.org/#download Kivy2.7z is using using python2(System Python), Kivy3.7z(Python3)

  2. Extract it using a Unarchiver programme like http://www.kekaosx.com/en/.

  3. Copy the Kivy2.app or Kivy3.app as Kivy.app to /Applications. Paste the following line onto the terminal:

    $ sudo mv Kivy2.app /Applications/Kivy.app
    
  4. Create a symlink named kivy to easily launch apps with kivy venv:

    $ ln -s /Applications/Kivy.app/Contents/Resources/script /usr/local/bin/kivy
    
  5. Examples and all the normal kivy tools are present in the Kivy.app/Contents/Resources/kivy dir

You should now have a kivy script that you can use to launch your kivy app from terminal.

You can just drag and drop your main.py to run your app too.

Installing modules

Kivy package on osx uses its own virtual env that is activated when you run your app using kivy command. To install any module you need to install the module like so:

$ kivy -m pip install <modulename>

Where are the modules/files installed?

Inside the relocatable venv within the app at:

Kivy.app/Contents/Resources/venv/

If you install a module that install’s a binary for example like kivy-garden That binary will be only available from the venv above, as in after you do:

kivy -m pip install kivy-garden

The garden lib will be only available when you activate this env.

source /Applications/Kivy.app/Contents/Resources/venv/bin/activate garden install mapview deactivate

To install binary files

Just copy the binary to the /Applications/Kivy.app/Contents/Resources/venv/bin/ directory.

To Include other frameworks

Kivy.app comes with SDL2 and Gstreamer frameworks provided. To Include frameworks other than the ones provided do the following:

git clone http://github.com/tito/osxrelocator
export PYTHONPATH=~/path/to/osxrelocator
cd /Applications/Kivy.app
python -m osxrelocator -r . /Library/Frameworks/<Framework_name>.framework/ \
@executable_path/../Frameworks/<Framework_name>.framework/

Do not forget to replace <Framework_name> with your framework. This tool osxrelocator essentially changes the path for the libs in the framework such that they are relative to the executable within the .app. Making the Framework relocatable with the .app.

Start any Kivy Application

You can run any Kivy application by simply dragging the application’s main file onto the Kivy.app icon. Just try this with any python file in the examples folder.

Start from the Command Line

If you want to use Kivy from the command line, double-click the Make Symlinks script after you have dragged the Kivy.app into the Applications folder. To test if it worked:

  1. Open Terminal.app and enter:

    $ kivy
    

    You should get a Python prompt.

  2. In there, type:

    >>> import kivy
    

    If it just goes to the next line without errors, it worked.

  3. Running any Kivy application from the command line is now simply a matter of executing a command like the following:

    $ kivy yourapplication.py
    

Using pip

Alternatively you can install Kivy using the following steps:

  1. Install the requirements using homebrew:

    $ brew install sdl2 sdl2_image sdl2_ttf sdl2_mixer gstreamer
    
  2. Install cython 0.23 and kivy using pip:

    $ pip install -I Cython==0.23
    $ USE_OSX_FRAMEWORKS=0 pip install kivy