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Installation on Windows

To install Kivy on Windows, please follow the main installation guide.

Installation components

Following, are additional information linked to from some of the steps in the main installation guide, specific to Windows.

Installing Python

To install Python on Windows, download it from the main Python website and follow the installation steps. You can read about the individual installation options in the Python guide.

If you installed the Python launcher, you will be more easily able to install multiple Python versions side by side and select, which to run, at each invocation.

Source installation Dependencies

To install Kivy from source, please follow the installation guide until you reach the Kivy install step and then install the compiler below before continuing.

To install kivy from source, you need a compiler. On Windows, the Visual Studio Build Tools are required, and they are available for free. You can either:

  • Download and install the complete Visual Studio IDE, which contains the build tools. This is the easiest approach and the IDE can be downloaded from here.

  • The IDE is very big, so you can also download just the smaller build tools, which are used from the command line. The current download (2019) can be found on this page under “Tools for Visual Studio 2019”. More info about this topic can be found in the Kivy wiki.

Now that the compiler is installed, continue to install Kivy.

Making Python available anywhere

There are two methods for launching Python when double clicking on your *.py files.

Double-click method

If you only have one Python installed, and if you installed it using the default options, then *.py files are already associated with your Python. You can run them by double clicking them in the file manager, or by just executing their name in a console window (without having to prepend python).

Alternatively, if they are not assigned, you can do it the following way:

  1. Right click on the Python file (.py file extension) in the file manager.

  2. From the context menu that appears, select Open With

  3. Browse your hard disk drive and find the python.exe file that you want to use (e.g. in the the virtual environment). Select it.

  4. Select “Always open the file with…” if you don’t want to repeat this procedure every time you double click a .py file.

  5. You are done. Open the file.

Send-to method

You can launch a .py file with Python using the Send to menu:

  1. Browse to the python.exe you want to use. Right click on it and copy it.

  2. Open Windows Explorer (the file explorer in Windows 8), and to go the address ‘shell:sendto’. You should get the special Windows directory SendTo.

  3. Paste the previously copied python.exe file as a shortcut.

  4. Rename it to python <python-version>. E.g. python39.

You can now execute your application by right clicking on the .py file -> “Send To” -> “python <python-version>”.