Python Installation Guide
This guide is intended for Python teams. Java and C++ teams can skip to WPILib Installation Guide. LabVIEW teams can skip to Installing LabVIEW for FRC (LabVIEW only).
Prerequisites
You must install a supported version of Python on a supported operating system. We currently support Python 3.8/3.9/3.10/3.11/3.12, but only 3.12 is available for the roboRIO.
- Supported Operating Systems and Architectures:
Windows 10 & 11, 64 bit only. 32 bit and Arm are not supported
macOS 13.3 or higher
Ubuntu 22.04 & 24.04, 64 bit. Other Linux distributions with glibc >= 2.35 may work, but are unsupported
On Windows and macOS, we recommend using the official Python installers distributed by python.org.
Install RobotPy
Once you have installed Python, you can use pip to install RobotPy on your development computer.
Note
If you previously installed a pre-2024 or 2024 beta version of RobotPy, you should first uninstall RobotPy via py -m pip uninstall robotpy
before upgrading.
Warning
On Windows, the Visual Studio 2019 redistributable package is required to be installed.
Run the following command from cmd or Powershell to install the core RobotPy packages:
py -3 -m pip install robotpy
To upgrade, you can run this:
py -3 -m pip install --upgrade robotpy
If you don’t have administrative rights on your computer, either use virtualenv/virtualenvwrapper-win, or or you can install to the user site-packages directory:
py -3 -m pip install --user robotpy
Note
If you previously installed a pre-2024 or 2024 beta version of RobotPy, you should first uninstall RobotPy via python3 -m pip uninstall robotpy
before upgrading.
On a macOS system that has pip installed, just run the following command from the Terminal application (may require admin rights):
python3 -m pip install robotpy
To upgrade, you can run this:
python3 -m pip install --upgrade robotpy
If you don’t have administrative rights on your computer, either use virtualenv/virtualenvwrapper, or you can install to the user site-packages directory:
python3 -m pip install --user robotpy
Note
If you previously installed a pre-2024 or 2024 beta version of RobotPy, you should first uninstall RobotPy via python3 -m pip uninstall robotpy
before upgrading.
RobotPy distributes manylinux binary wheels on PyPI. However, installing these requires a distro that has glibc 2.35 or newer, and an installer that implements PEP 600, such as pip 20.3 or newer. You can check your version of pip with the following command:
python3 -m pip --version
If you need to upgrade your version of pip, it is highly recommended to use a virtual environment.
If you have a compatible version of pip, you can simply run:
python3 -m pip install robotpy
To upgrade, you can run this:
python3 -m pip install --upgrade robotpy
If you manage to install the packages and get the following error or something similar, your system is most likely not compatible with RobotPy:
OSError: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.22' not found (required by /usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/wpiutil/lib/libwpiutil.so)
We publish prebuilt wheels on artifactory, which can be downloaded by giving the --extra-index-url
option to pip:
python3 -m pip install --extra-index-url=https://wpilib.jfrog.io/artifactory/api/pypi/wpilib-python-release-2024/simple robotpy
source install
Alternatively, if you have a C++20 compiler installed, you may be able to use pip to install RobotPy from source.
Warning
It may take a very long time to install!
Warning
Mixing our pre-built wheels with source installs may cause runtime errors. This is due to internal ABI incompatibility between compiler versions.
Our ARM wheels are built for Debian 11 with GCC 10.
If you need to build with a specific compiler version, you can specify them using the CC
and CXX
environment variables:
export CC=gcc-12 CXX=g++-12
Download RobotPy for roboRIO
After installing the robotpy
project on your computer, there are a variety of commands available that can be ran from the command line via the robotpy
module.
If you already have a RobotPy robot project, you can use that to download the pieces needed to run on the roboRIO. If you don’t have a project, running this command in an empty directory will initialize a new robot project:
py -3 -m robotpy init
python3 -m robotpy init
python3 -m robotpy init
This will create a robot.py
and pyproject.toml
file. The pyproject.toml
file should be customized and details the requirements needed to run your robot code, among other things.
See also
The default pyproject.toml
created for you only contains the version of RobotPy installed on your computer. If you want to enable vendor packages or install other python packages from PyPI, see our pyproject.toml documentation
Next run the robotpy sync
subcommand, which will:
Download Python compiled for roboRIO
Download roboRIO compatible python packages as specified by your
pyproject.toml
Install the packages specified by your
pyproject.toml
into your local environment
Note
If you aren’t using a virtualenv and don’t have administrative privileges, the robotpy sync
command accepts a --user
argument to install to the user-specific site-packages directory.
py -3 -m robotpy sync
python3 -m robotpy sync
python3 -m robotpy sync
When you deploy your code to the roboRIO, the deploy subcommand will automatically install Python (if needed) and your robot project requirements on the roboRIO as part of the deploy process.