INSTALL.md

PyBitmessage Installation Instructions

• Binary (64bit, no separate installation of dependencies required)
  • Windows: https://artifacts.bitmessage.at/winebuild/
  • Linux AppImages: https://artifacts.bitmessage.at/appimage/
  • Linux snaps: https://artifacts.bitmessage.at/snap/
  • Mac (not up to date): https://github.com/Bitmessage/PyBitmessage/releases/tag/v0.6.1
• Source git clone git://github.com/Bitmessage/PyBitmessage.git

Notes on the AppImages

The AppImage is a bundle, built by the appimage-builder from the Ubuntu Bionic deb files, the sources and bitmsghash.so, precompiled for 3 architectures, using the packages/AppImage/AppImageBuilder.yml recipe.

When you run the appimage the bundle is loop mounted to a location like /tmp/.mount_PyBitm97wj4K with squashfs-tools.

The appimage name has several informational filds:

PyBitmessage-<VERSION>-g<COMMITHASH>[-alpha]-<ARCH>.AppImage

E.g. PyBitmessage-0.6.3.2-ge571ba8a-x86_64.AppImage is an appimage, built from the v0.6 for x86_64 and PyBitmessage-0.6.3.2-g9de2aaf1-alpha-aarch64.AppImage is one, built from some development branch for arm64.

You can also build the appimage with local code. For that you need installed docker:

$ docker build -t bm-appimage -f .buildbot/appimage/Dockerfile .
$ docker run -t --rm -v "$(pwd)"/dist:/out bm-appimage .buildbot/appimage/build.sh

The appimages should be in the dist dir.

Helper Script for building from source

Go to the directory with PyBitmessage source code and run:

python checkdeps.py

If there are missing dependencies, it will explain you what is missing and for many Unix-like systems also what you have to do to resolve it. You need to repeat calling the script until you get nothing mandatory missing. How you then run setuptools depends on whether you want to install it to user's directory or system.

If checkdeps fails, then verify manually which dependencies are missing from below

Before running PyBitmessage, make sure you have all the necessary dependencies installed on your system.

These dependencies may not be available on a recent OS and PyBitmessage may not build on such systems. Here's a list of dependencies needed for PyBitmessage based on operating system

For Debian-based (Ubuntu, Raspbian, PiBang, others)

python2.7 openssl libssl-dev python-msgpack python-qt4 python-six

For Arch Linux

python2 openssl python2-pyqt4 python-six

For Fedora

python python-qt4 openssl-compat-bitcoin-libs python-six

For Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

python python-qt4 openssl-compat-bitcoin-libs python-six

For GNU Guix

python2-msgpack python2-pyqt@4.11.4 python2-sip openssl python-six

setuptools

This is now the recommended and in most cases the easiest way for installing PyBitmessage.

There are 2 options for installing with setuptools: root and user.

as root:

python setup.py install
pybitmessage

as user:

python setup.py install --user
~/.local/bin/pybitmessage

pip venv (daemon):

Create virtualenv with Python 2.x version

virtualenv -p python2 env

Activate env

source env/bin/activate

Build & run pybitmessage

pip install .
pybitmessage -d

Alternative way to run PyBitmessage, without setuptools (this isn't recommended)

run ./start.sh.