Building and Installing PyZMQ

pip

We build eggs for OS X and Windows, so we recommend that those platforms use easy_install pyzmq. But many users prefer pip, which unfortunately still ignores eggs. In an effort to make pyzmq easier to install, pyzmq will try to build libzmq as a Python extension if it cannot find a libzmq to link against.

This is thanks to work done in pyzmq_static.

Linking against system libzmq is still the preferred mechanism, so pyzmq will try pretty hard to find it. You can skip the searching by explicitly specifying that pyzmq build its own libzmq:

$> pip install pyzmq --install-option="--zmq=bundled"

Eggs and MSIs

We have binary installers for various Pythons on OSX and Windows, so you should be able to just easy_install pyzmq in many situations. These eggs include matching libzmq, so they should be the only thing you need to start using pyzmq, but we simply don't have the experience to know when and where these installers will not work.

If a binary installer fails for you, please tell us about your system and the failure, so that we can try to fix it in later releases, and fall back on building from source.

Eggs are on PyPI, and we have them for 'current' Pythons, which are for OSX 10.7:

• Python 2.7, 3.2 (32b+64b intel)

and OSX 10.6:

• Python 2.6 (32b+64b intel)

and Windows (x86 and x64):

• Python 2.7, 3.2

We also have MSI installer packages in our downloads section on GitHub.

A Python 2.6/win64 MSI for 2.1.7 was provided by Craig Austin (craig DOT austin AT gmail DOT com)

Our build scripts are much improved as of 2.1.4, so if you would like to contribute better Windows installers, or have any improvements on existing releases, they would be much appreciated. Simply python setup.py bdist_msi or python setupegg.py bdist_egg should work, once you have libzmq and Python. We simply don't have the VMs or time in which to cover all the bases ourselves.

Building PyZMQ from source

To build and install pyzmq from source, you will first need to build libzmq. After you have done this, follow these steps:

Tell pyzmq where libzmq is via the configure subcommand:

$ python setup.py configure --zmq=/path/to/zeromq

or the zmq install directory on OSX/Linux:

$ python setup.py configure --zmq=/usr/local

The argument should be a directory containing lib and include directories, with libzmq and zmq.h respectively. For instance (on Windows), if you have downloaded pyzmq and current libzmq into the same parent directory, this would be:

$ python setup.py configure --zmq=../zeromq-2.2.0

Second, run this command:

$ python setup.py install

Cython is not required to build pyzmq from a release package, but it is required if you want to develop pyzmq, or build directly from our repository on GitHub.

Windows

On Windows, libzmq.dll will be copied into the zmq directory, and installed along with pyzmq, so you shouldn't need to edit your PATH.

It is best to compile both ØMQ and PyØMQ with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 (2010 for Python ≥ 3.3). You should not need to use mingw. If you build libzmq with VS that does not match the one used to build Python, then there may be issues in error handling, because there will be a mismatch between error numbers.

Current testing indicates that running

$ python setup.py bdist_msi

successfully builds a working MSI installer, but we don't have enough Windows deployment experience to know where that may fail.

Windows x64

64b Windows builds have been successful (as of 2.1.7.1), using VC++ 2008 express, and the Windows 7 SDK. VS2008 had to be patched as described here, and pyzmq was built following these instructions on the Cython wiki.

Linux

If you install libzmq to a location other than the default (/usr/local) on Linux, you may need to do one of the following:

• Set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to point to the lib directory of ØMQ.

• Build the extension using the --rpath flag:

  $ python setup.py build_ext --rpath=/opt/zeromq-dev/lib
  

Mac OSX

The easiest way to install libzmq on OSX is with the wonderful homebrew package manager, via:

$ brew install zeromq

And to build a 32+64b intel fat binary, add --universal:

$ brew install zeromq --universal

This will install libzmq in /usr/local.

Development

To develop PyZMQ, you will need to install Cython, version 0.15 or greater. After installing Cython, instead of doing python setup.py install do:

$ python setup.py build_ext --inplace
$ python setupegg.py develop

This will build the C extension inplace and then put this directory on your sys.path. With this configuration you only have to run:

$ python setup.py build_ext --inplace

each time you change the .pyx files. To clean the sources, you can do:

$ python setup.py clean

Testing

To run the test suite after building pyzmq in-place, just do:

$ python setup.py test

or

$ nosetests zmq.tests

after an install.