I found myself needing to make a GUI tool for work using a recent version of Ubuntu. These are the steps I followed.
*Install Ubuntu packages needed
sudo apt install pkg-config libglib2.0-dev libgtk-3-dev libgirepository1.0-dev;
You should already have python3 by default.
Note, in Ubuntu 20 you may also need these packages as well for the pycairo/wheels dependency:
sudo apt install libcairo2-dev python3-dev;
*Create a virtual env and set permissions
(Note: You will need to install the package for pip3 for python 3 if it is not already installed)
Choose a location on your machine to hold your python virtualenv, e.g mine will be "/opt/python3".
Find your python 3 path, e.g.
which python3
- mine is /usr/bin/python3
pip3 install virtualenv;
sudo mkdir -p /opt/py3env;
sudo chown scott:scott -R /opt/py3env;
sudo chmod 777 -R /opt/py3env;
virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python3 /opt/py3env;
*Start using the new virtualenv
source /opt/py3env//bin/activate;
pip install --upgrade pip
*Install PyGObject in the virtualenv
pip install pygobject
See the output:
Successfully installed pycairo-1.20.0 pygobject-3.38.0
*Try a "hello world" program
Save this code in an editor, e.g. as a file named "hello_world.py":
#!/usr/bin/env python
import gi
gi.require_version("Gtk", "3.0")
from gi.repository import Gtk
window = Gtk.Window(title="Hello World")
window.show()
window.connect("destroy", Gtk.main_quit)
Gtk.main()
*Run the program on the command line:
python hello_world.py
You should see a small GUI window appear! (You might need to stretch it to see its title bar "Hello World")
