pyspotify is packaged for various operating systems and in multiple Linux distributions. What way to install pyspotify is best for you depends upon your OS and/or distribution.
The Mopidy project runs its own APT archive which includes pyspotify built for:
The packages are available for multiple CPU architectures: i386, amd64, armel, and armhf (compatible with Raspbian and Raspberry Pi 1).
To install and receive future updates:
Add the archive’s GPG key:
wget -q -O - https://apt.mopidy.com/mopidy.gpg | sudo apt-key add -
If you run Debian wheezy or Ubuntu 12.04 LTS:
sudo wget -q -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mopidy.list https://apt.mopidy.com/wheezy.list
Or, if you run any newer Debian/Ubuntu distro:
sudo wget -q -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mopidy.list https://apt.mopidy.com/jessie.list
Install pyspotify and all dependencies:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python-spotify
If you are running Arch Linux, you can install Mopidy using the python2-pyspotify package found in AUR.
To install pyspotify with all dependencies, run:
yaourt -S python2-pyspotify
From PyPI, you can install precompiled wheel packages of pyspotify that bundle libspotify. The packages should work on all combinations of:
Make sure you have a recent version of pip, which will default to installing a wheel package if available:
pip install --upgrade pip
Install pyspotify:
pip install pyspotify
The Mopidy project maintains its own Homebrew tap which includes pyspotify and its dependencies.
Install Homebrew.
Make sure your installation is up to date:
brew update
brew upgrade --all
Install pyspotify from the mopidy/mopidy tap:
brew install mopidy/mopidy/python-spotify
If you are on Linux, but your distro don’t package pyspotify, you can install pyspotify from PyPI using the pip installer. However, since pyspotify is a Python wrapper around the libspotify library, pyspotify necessarily depends on libspotify and it must be installed first.
libspotify is provided as a binary download for a selection of operating systems and CPU architectures from the libspotify site. If libspotify isn’t available for your OS or architecture, then you’re out of luck and can’t use pyspotify either.
To install libspotify, use one of the options below, or follow the instructions on the libspotify site and in the README file of the libspotify tarball.
If you’re running a Debian-based Linux distribution, like Ubuntu, you can get Debian packages of libspotify from apt.mopidy.com. Follow the instructions above to make the apt.mopidy.com archive available on your system, then install libspotify:
sudo apt-get install libspotify-dev
libspotify is packaged in rpmfusion non-free. Install the repository package, then run:
yum -y install libspotify-devel
If you’re using Homebrew, it has a formula for libspotify in the homebrew/binary tap:
brew install homebrew/binary/libspotify
Warning
There’s an issue with building pyspotify against libspotify on OS X where the pyspotify installation fails with “Reason: image not found”.
A known workaround is to create a symlink after installing libspotify, but before installing pyspotify:
ln -s /usr/local/opt/libspotify/lib/libspotify.12.1.51.dylib \
/usr/local/opt/libspotify/lib/libspotify
Alternatively, the mopidy/mopidy Homebrew tap has a libspotify formula which includes the workaround:
brew install mopidy/mopidy/libspotify
For details, or if you have a proper fix for this, see #130.
To build pyspotify, you need a C compiler, Python development headers, and libffi development headers. All of this is easily installed using your system’s package manager.
If you’re on a Debian-based system, you can install the pyspotify build dependencies by running:
sudo apt-get install build-essential python-dev python3-dev libffi-dev
If you’re on Arch Linux, you can install the pyspotify build dependencies by running:
sudo pacman -S base-devel python2 python
If you’re on OS X, you’ll need to install the Xcode command line developer tools. Even if you’ve already installed Xcode from the App Store, e.g. to get Homebrew working, you should run this command:
xcode-select --install
Note
If you get an error about ffi.h not being found when installing the cffi Python package, try running the above command.
With libspotify and the build tools in place, you can finally build pyspotify.
To download and build pyspotify from PyPI, run:
pip install pyspotify
Or, if you have a checkout of the pyspotify git repo, run:
pip install -e path/to/my/pyspotify/git/clone
Once you have pyspotify installed, you should head over to Quickstart for a short introduction to pyspotify.