This package contains Python bindings for ØMQ. ØMQ is a lightweight and fast messaging implementation.
Current release of pyzmq is 2.1.11, and targets libzmq-2.1.11. For libzmq 2.0.x, use pyzmq release 2.0.10.1 or the 2.0.x development branch.
PyZMQ versioning follows libzmq versioning. In general, your pyzmq version should be the same as that of your libzmq, but due to the generally growing API of libzmq, your pyzmq should not be newer than your libzmq. This is a strict restriction for pyzmq <= 2.1.0, but we intend to support libzmq >= 2.1.4 (the first 'stable' 2.1 release) for pyzmq 2.1.x.
For a summary of changes to pyzmq, see our changelog.
As of 2.1.7, we have experimental support for the 3.x API of libzmq, developed at https://github.com/zeromq/libzmq. No code to change, no flags to pass, just build pyzmq against libzmq3 and it should work.
See PyZMQ's Sphinx-generated documentation on GitHub for API details, and some notes on Python and Cython development. If you want to learn about using ØMQ in general, the excellect ØMQ Guide is the place to start, which has a Python version of every example.
Unless you specifically want to develop PyZMQ, we recommend downloading the PyZMQ source code or MSI installer from our GitHub download page, or an egg from PyPI.
You can also get the latest source code from our GitHub repository, but building from the repository will require that you install Cython version 0.13 or later.
We have binary installers for various Pythons on OSX and Windows, so you should be able to
just easy_install pyzmq
in many situations. These eggs include matching libzmq, so they should
be the only thing you need to start using pyzmq, but we simply don't have the experience to know
when and where these installers will not work.
If a binary installer fails for you, please tell us about your system and the failure, so that we can try to fix it in later releases, and fall back on building from source.
Eggs are on PyPI, and we have them for 'current' Pythons, which are for OSX 10.7:
- Python 2.7, 3.2 (32b+64b intel)
and OSX 10.6:
- Python 2.6 (32b+64b intel)
and Windows (x86 and x64):
- Python 2.7, 3.2
We also have MSI installer packages in our downloads section on GitHub.
A Python 2.6/win64 MSI for 2.1.7 was provided by Craig Austin (craig DOT austin AT gmail DOT com)
Our build scripts are much improved as of 2.1.4, so if you would like to contribute better
Windows installers, or have any improvements on existing releases, they would be much
appreciated. Simply python setup.py bdist_msi
or python setupegg.py bdist_egg
should
work, once you have libzmq and Python. We simply don't have the VMs or time in which to cover
all the bases ourselves.
Note
Sometimes libzmq.so/dll/dylib doesn't get included unless build
is
specified also, e.g. python setupegg.py build bdist_egg
, but this
doesn't always seem to be true.
To build and install pyzmq from source, you will first need to build libzmq. After you have done this, follow these steps:
Tell pyzmq where libzmq is via the configure subcommand:
$ python setup.py configure --zmq=/path/to/zeromq
or the zmq install directory on OSX/Linux:
$ python setup.py configure --zmq=/usr/local
The argument should be a directory containing lib
and include
directories, with
libzmq
and zmq.h
respectively. For instance (on Windows), if you have downloaded pyzmq
and current libzmq into the same parent directory, this would be:
$ python setup.py configure --zmq=../zeromq-2.1.11
Second, run this command:
$ python setup.py install
Cython is not required to build pyzmq from a release package, but it is required if you want to develop pyzmq, or build directly from our repository on GitHub.
On Windows, libzmq.dll will be copied into the zmq directory, and installed along with pyzmq,
so you shouldn't need to edit your PATH
.
It is best to compile both ØMQ and PyØMQ with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. You should not need to use mingw. If you build libzmq with MSVS 2010, then there will be issues in error handling, because there will be a mismatch between error numbers.
Current testing indicates that running
$ python setup.py bdist_msi
successfully builds a working MSI installer, but we don't have enough Windows deployment experience to know where that may fail.
64b Windows builds have been successful (as of 2.1.7.1), using VC++ 2008 express, and the Windows 7 SDK. VS2008 had to be patched as described here, and pyzmq was built following these instructions on the Cython wiki.
If you install libzmq to a location other than the default (/usr/local
) on Linux,
you may need to do one of the following:
Set
LD_LIBRARY_PATH
to point to thelib
directory of ØMQ.Build the extension using the
--rpath
flag:$ python setup.py build_ext --rpath=/opt/zeromq-dev/lib --inplace
The easiest way to install libzmq on OSX is with the wonderful homebrew package manager, via:
$ brew install zeromq
And to build a 32+64b intel fat binary, add --universal
:
$ brew install zeromq --universal
This will install libzmq in /usr/local, making pyzmq installable with pip, which doesn't support our binary eggs.
To develop PyZMQ, you will need to install Cython, version 0.13 or greater.
After installing Cython, instead of doing python setup.py install
do:
$ python setup.py build_ext --inplace $ python setupegg.py develop
This will build the C extension inplace and then put this directory on your
sys.path
. With this configuration you only have to run:
$ python setup.py build_ext --inplace
each time you change the .pyx
files. To clean the sources, you can do:
$ python setup.py clean
To run the test suite after installing, just do:
$ python setup.py test