# Installation

## OS/distro packages

The following packages are user-contributed and were up-to-date at the time of writing:

- ArchLinux (AUR)
- Ubuntu and Debian, x86_64-only (packages also exist in the official repositories but may be out of date)
- GNU Guix
- OS X (homebrew)
- BSD (pkgsrc)
- OpenBSD

We only support the latest version of vdirsyncer, which is at the time of this writing 0.16.3. Please do not file bugs if you use an older version.

Some distributions have multiple release channels. Debian and Fedora for example have a “stable” release channel that ships an older version of vdirsyncer. Those versions aren’t supported either.

If there is no suitable package for your distribution, you’ll need to install vdirsyncer manually. There is an easy command to copy-and-paste for this as well, but you should be aware of its consequences.

## Manual installation

If your distribution doesn’t provide a package for vdirsyncer, you still can use Python’s package manager “pip”. First, you’ll have to check that the following things are installed:

- Python 3.4+ and pip.
- `libxml` and `libxslt`
- `zlib`
- Linux or OS X. Windows is not supported, see :gh:`535`.

On Linux systems, using the distro’s package manager is the best way to do this, for example, using Ubuntu:

    sudo apt-get install libxml2 libxslt1.1 zlib1g python

Then you have several options. The following text applies for most Python software by the way.

### The dirty, easy way

The easiest way to install vdirsyncer at this point would be to run:

    pip install --user --ignore-installed vdirsyncer

- `--user` is to install without root rights (into your home directory)
- `--ignore-installed` is to work around Debian’s potentially broken packages (see Requests-related ImportErrors).

This method has a major flaw though: Pip doesn’t keep track of the files it installs. Vdirsyncer’s files would be located somewhere in `~/.local/lib/python*`, but you can’t possibly know which packages were installed as dependencies of vdirsyncer and which ones were not, should you decide to uninstall it. In other words, using pip that way would pollute your home directory.

### The clean, hard way

There is a way to install Python software without scattering stuff across your filesystem: virtualenv. There are a lot of resources on how to use it, the simplest possible way would look something like:

    virtualenv ~/vdirsyncer_env
    ~/vdirsyncer_env/bin/pip install vdirsyncer
    alias vdirsyncer="~/vdirsyncer_env/bin/vdirsyncer

You’ll have to put the last line into your `.bashrc` or `.bash_profile`.

This method has two advantages:

- It separately installs all Python packages into `~/vdirsyncer_env/`, without relying on the system packages. This works around OS- or distro-specific issues.
- You can delete `~/vdirsyncer_env/` to uninstall vdirsyncer entirely.

### The clean, easy way

pipsi is a new package manager for Python-based software that automatically sets up a virtualenv for each program you install. Assuming you have it installed on your operating system, you can do:

    pipsi install --python python3 vdirsyncer

and `.local/bin/vdirsyncer` will be your new vdirsyncer installation. To update vdirsyncer to the latest version:

    pipsi upgrade vdirsyncer

If you’re done with vdirsyncer, you can do:

    pipsi uninstall vdirsyncer

and vdirsyncer will be uninstalled, including its dependencies.