Installation

Download

For the easiest installation download and install the Standalone package.

For the easiest installation download and install the Standalone package.

PsychoPy 2024.2.4 modern (py3.10)

PsychoPy 2024.2.4 compatibility+ (py3.8)

The Compatibility+ version is for users who need to run older scripts that are not compatible with the newer versions of Python (PsychoPy has supported Python 3.10 since 2022.2.0).

For the easiest installation download and install the Standalone package.

PsychoPy 2024.2.4 modern (py3.10)

PsychoPy 2024.2.5 compatibility+ (py3.8)

The Compatibility+ version is for users who need to run older scripts that are not compatible with the newer versions of Python (PsychoPy has supported Python 3.10 since 2022.2.0).

The modern version uses a more recent version of Python and cannot run experiments that use PsychoPy<2023.2.0

The following will install PsychoPy into

# create a virtual environment and activate it
python3.10 -m venv ~/.psychopy_py310
source ~/.psychopy_py310/bin/activate

# fetch and run install script
python -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/psychopy/psychopy/dev/installPsychoPy.py)"

For all versions see the PsychoPy releases on github

PsychoPy® is distributed under the GPL3 license

Manual installations

See below for options if you don’t want to use the Standalone releases:

pip install

Now that most python libraries can be installed using pip it’s relatively easy to manually install PsychoPy® and all it’s dependencies to your own installation of Python.

The steps are to fetch Python. This method should work on a range of versions of Python but we strongly recommend you use Python 3.10 or 3.8. Older Python versions are no longer being tested and may not work correctly. Newer Python versions may not have wheels for all the necessary dependencies even though we believe that PsychoPy’s code, itself, is compatible up to at least Python 3.10.

You can install PsychoPy® and its dependencies (more than you’ll strictly need, depending on the features you use) by:

pip install psychopy

If you prefer not to install all the dependencies (e.g. because the platform or Python version you’re on doesn’t have that dependency easily available) then you could do:

pip install psychopy --no-deps

and then install them manually. On Windows, if you need a package that isn’t available on PyPI you may want to try the unofficial packages by Christoph Gohlke

brew install

This is a user-contributed option and may or may not work.

On a MacOS machine, brew can be used to install PsychoPy®:

brew install --cask psychopy

Linux

We are aware that the procedure for installing on Linux is often rather painful. This is not the platform that the core PsychoPy developers currently use so support is less good than on some platforms. Feel free to jump in and help improve it as a contributor! :-)

There used to be neurodebian and Gentoo packages for PsychoPy® but these are both badly outdated. We’d recommend you do:

# with --no-deps flag if you want to install dependencies manually
pip install psychopy

Then fetch a wxPython wheel for your platform from:

https://extras.wxpython.org/wxPython4/extras/linux/gtk3/

and having downloaded the right wheel you can then install it with something like:

pip install path/to/your/wxpython.whl

wxPython>4.0 and doesn’t have universal wheels yet which is why you have to find and install the correct wheel for your particular flavor of linux.

For some reasons wxPython (wx.html2) is using an older version of libwebkitgtk e.g. psychopy will not show up to fix this (of our own risk): sudo add-apt-repository ‘deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic main universe’ sudo apt install -t bionic libwebkitgtk-1.0-0

Building Python PsychToolbox bindings:

The PsychToolbox bindings for Python provide superior timing for sounds and keyboard responses. Unfortunately we haven’t been able to build universal wheels for these yet so you may have to build the pkg yourself. That should not be hard. You need the necessary dev libraries installed first:

sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0-0-dev portaudio19-dev libasound2-dev

and then you should be able to install using pip and it will build the extensions as needed:

pip install psychtoolbox

Anaconda and Miniconda

Support for conda was contributed and is badly outdated but you may be able to get it working using pip install within your conda environment.

Generally we recommend you use StandalonePsychoPy instead, for experiment creation, as an entirely separate app, and use your conda installation for other (e.g. analysis) scripts.

Alternatively if someone wants to jump in and get things working here again that would be appreciated by other users I’m sure.

Developers install

Ensure you have Python 3.8 and the latest version of pip installed:

python --version
pip --version

Next, follow the instructions to fork and fetch the latest version of the PsychoPy® repository.

From the directory where you cloned the latest PsychoPy® repository (i.e., where setup.py resides), run:

pip install -e .

This will install all PsychoPy® dependencies to your default Python distribution (which should be Python 3.8). Next, you should create a new PsychoPy® shortcut linking your newly installed dependencies to your current version of PsychoPy® in the cloned repository. To do this, simply create a new .BAT file containing:

"C:\PATH_TO_PYTHON3.8\python.exe C:\PATH_TO_CLONED_PSYCHOPY_REPO\psychopy\app\psychopyApp.py"

Alternatively, you can run the psychopyApp.py from the command line:

python C:\PATH_TO_CLONED_PSYCHOPY_REPO\psychopy\app\psychopyApp

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