Installation

Download

Stable

Tried and tested, this is the release that’s been out in the wild for a bit and has already had any post-release bug fixes it needed. The best option for an install that “just works”.

PsychoPy 2024.2.4 (py3.10)

Compatibility+ installer (py3.8)

PsychoPy 2024.2.4 compatibility+ (py3.8)

Beta

Hot off the presses, this is the latest release with all the newest features. If you’re fine with a few bugs so long as you get the cutting edge features as soon as they’re ready, this is the install for you.

PsychoPy 2025.1.0beta (py3.10)

Compatibility+ installer (py3.8)

PsychoPy 2025.1.0 compatibility+ (py3.8)

Stable

Tried and tested, this is the release that’s been out in the wild for a bit and has already had any post-release bug fixes it needed. The best option for an install that “just works”.

PsychoPy 2024.2.4 (py3.10)

Compatibility+ installer (py3.8)

PsychoPy 2024.2.4 compatibility+ (py3.8)

Beta

Hot off the presses, this is the latest release with all the newest features. If you’re fine with a few bugs so long as you get the cutting edge features as soon as they’re ready, this is the install for you.

PsychoPy 2025.1.0beta (py3.10)

Compatibility+ installer (py3.8)

PsychoPy 2025.1.0 compatibility+ (py3.8)

Install curl with your package manager. On most distros, curl is already installed.

  1. Download the script:

curl -LOs https://github.com/wieluk/psychopy_linux_installer/releases/latest/download/psychopy_linux_installer

  1. Make it executable:

chmod +x psychopy_linux_installer

  1. Run the installer:

  • GUI Mode:

    ./psychopy_linux_installer --gui

    Note: curl and zenity are required for GUI mode.

  • Command-Line Mode:

    ./psychopy_linux_installer

For a list of available arguments, run:

./psychopy_linux_installer --help

For more detailed information or to report bugs, please visit the psychopy_linux_installer GitHub page.

For all versions see the PsychoPy releases on github

PsychoPy® is distributed under the GPL3 license

Do I need the Compatibility+ installer?

While PsychoPy has supported Python 3.10 since version 2022.2.0, the Use PsychoPy version parameter in Experiment Settings makes it possible to run an experiment using an older version of the PsychoPy library, including versions from before Python 3.10 was supported - meaning they will fail to run if your installed Python is newer than version 3.8. The Compatibility+ installer installs PsychoPy with Python 3.8, allowing you to run these legacy experiments, but losing out on the speed and stability improvements which come with a newer version of Python.

We recommend installing via the Compatibility+ installer only if necessary, as besides running legacy experiments, PsychoPy will perform faster and better in Python 3.10.

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 first make sure you have a compatible Python version installed (currently >=3.8, <3.11). If you need an older version, you can on Ubuntu for example do:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:deadsnakes/ppa
sudo apt update
sudo apt install python3.10-venv python3.10-dev
python3.10 -m venv path/to/new/psychopyenv  # choose a path of interest!
source path/to/new/psychopyenv/bin/activate

Once you have a compatible Python activated, copy the link to 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 https://extras.wxpython.org/wxPython4/extras/linux/gtk3/ubuntu-22.04/wxPython-4.2.1-cp310-cp310-linux_x86_64.whl

wxPython>=4.0 doesn’t have universal wheels yet which is why you have to find and install the correct wheel for your particular flavor of linux. If a wheel is not yet available for your platform (e.g., a new version of Linux), you will have to build it manually. For example, you can use pip download wxPython, extract the archive, enter the directory, and try python setup.py bdist_wheel to build a wheel yourself. You will likely need to install some system build dependencies. Once it builds, you can install for example with pip install dist/wxPython*.whl.

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

Finally, you can do:

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

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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