# Build from source

kitty is designed to run from source, for easy hack-ability. Make sure the following dependencies are installed first.

Note

If you are making small changes only to the python parts of kitty, there is no need to build kitty at all, instead, assuming you have installed the official kitty binaries, you can simply set the KITTY_DEVELOP_FROM enviroment variable to point to the directory into which you have checked out the kitty source code. kitty will then load its python code from there. You should use a version of the source that matches the binary version as closely as possible, since the two are tightly coupled.

## Dependencies

Run-time dependencies:

- `python` >= 3.6

- `harfbuzz` >= 2.2.0

- `zlib`

- `libpng`

- `liblcms2`

- `freetype` (not needed on macOS)

- `fontconfig` (not needed on macOS)

- `libcanberra` (not needed on macOS)

- `ImageMagick` (optional, needed to use the `kitty +kitten icat` tool to display images in the terminal)

- `pygments` (optional, needed for syntax highlighting in `kitty +kitten diff`)

Build-time dependencies:

- `gcc` or `clang`

- `pkg-config`

- For building on Linux in addition to the above dependencies you might also need to install the `-dev` packages for: `libdbus-1-dev`, `libxcursor-dev`, `libxrandr-dev`, `libxi-dev`, `libxinerama-dev`, `libgl1-mesa-dev`, `libxkbcommon-x11-dev`, `libfontconfig-dev`, `libx11-xcb-dev`, `liblcms2-dev`, and `libpython3-dev`, if they are not already installed by your distro.

## Install and run from source

    git clone https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty && cd kitty

Now build the native code parts of kitty with the following command:

    make

You can run kitty, as:

    ./kitty/launcher/kitty

If that works, you can create a symlink to the launcher in `~/bin` or some other directory on your PATH so that you can run kitty using just `kitty`.

## Building kitty.app on macOS from source

Run:

    make app

This `kitty.app` unlike the released one does not include its own copy of python and the other dependencies. So if you ever un-install/upgrade those dependencies you might have to rebuild the app.

Note

The released `kitty.dmg` includes all dependencies, unlike the `kitty.app` built above and is built automatically by using the bypy framework however, that is designed to run on Linux and is not for the faint of heart.

Note

Apple disallows certain functionality, such as notifications for unsigned applications. If you need this functionality, you can try signing the built kitty.app with a self signed certificate, see for example, here.

## Build and run from source with Nix

On NixOS or any other Linux or macOS system with the Nix package manager installed, execute nix-shell to create the correct environment to build kitty or use `nix-shell --pure` instead to eliminate most of the influence of the outside system, e.g. globally installed packages. `nix-shell` will automatically fetch all required dependencies and make them available in the newly spawned shell.

Then proceed with `make` or `make app` according to the platform specific instructions above.

## Note for Linux/macOS packagers

The released kitty source code is available as a tarball from the GitHub releases page.

While kitty does use python, it is not a traditional python package, so please do not install it in site-packages. Instead run:

    python3 setup.py linux-package

This will install kitty into the directory `linux-package`. You can run kitty with `linux-package/bin/kitty`. All the files needed to run kitty will be in `linux-package/lib/kitty`. The terminfo file will be installed into `linux-package/share/terminfo`. Simply copy these files into `/usr` to install kitty. In other words, `linux-package` is the staging area into which kitty is installed. You can choose a different staging area, by passing the `--prefix` argument to `setup.py`.

You should probably split kitty into two packages, `kitty-terminfo` that installs the terminfo file and `kitty` that installs the main program. This allows users to install the terminfo file on servers into which they ssh, without needing to install all of kitty.

Note

You need a couple of extra dependencies to build linux-package. `tic` to compile terminfo files, usually found in the development package of `ncurses`. Also, if you are building from a git checkout instead of the released source code tarball, you will need to install the dependencies from `docs/requirements.txt` to build the kitty documentation. They can be installed most easily with `python -m pip -r docs/requirements.txt`.

This applies to creating packages for kitty for macOS package managers such as brew or MacPorts as well.

Note

kitty has its own update check mechanism, if you would like to turn it off for your package, use `python3 setup.py linux-package --update-check-interval=0`