Installing qutebrowser

On Debian / Ubuntu

qutebrowser should run on these systems:

Debian jessie or newer
Ubuntu Trusty (14.04 LTS) or newer
Any other distribution based on these (e.g. Linux Mint 17+)

Unfortunately there is no Debian package yet, but installing qutebrowser is still relatively easy! If you want to help packaging it for Debian, please get in touch!

Install the dependencies via apt-get:

Note

On Debian, it’s recommended to install the Qt packages from the experimental repository as those are a much newer version of Qt which is more stable.

Add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian experimental main

Then install the packages like this:

# apt-get update
# apt-get install -t experimental python3-pyqt5 python3-pyqt5.qtwebkit python3-sip python3-dev
# apt-get install python-tox

It’s also recommended to pin those packages to receive updates by creating a file /etc/apt/preferences.d/qutebrowser with the following contents:

Package: python3-pyqt5* libqt5*
Pin: release a=experimental
Pin-Priority: 800

For distributions other than Debian or if you prefer to not use the experimental repo:

# apt-get install python3-pyqt5 python3-pyqt5.qtwebkit python-tox python3-sip python3-dev

To generate the documentation for the :help command, when using the git repository (rather than a release):

# apt-get install asciidoc source-highlight
$ python3 scripts/asciidoc2html.py

Then install qutebrowser via tox.

On Fedora

qutebrowser should run on Fedora 22.

Unfortunately there is no Fedora package yet, but installing qutebrowser is still relatively easy! If you want to help packaging it for Fedora, please get in touch!

Install the dependencies via dnf:

# dnf update
# dnf install python3-qt5 python-tox python3-sip

To generate the documentation for the :help command, when using the git repository (rather than a release):

# dnf install asciidoc source-highlight
$ python3 scripts/asciidoc2html.py

Then install qutebrowser via tox.

On Archlinux

qutebrowser is available in the official [community] repository.

# pacman -S qutebrowser

There is also a -git version available in the AUR: qutebrowser-git.

You can install it using makepkg like this:

$ git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/qutebrowser-git.git
$ cd qutebrowser-git
$ makepkg -si
$ cd ..
$ rm -r qutebrowser-git

or you could use an AUR helper, e.g. yaourt -S qutebrowser-git.

On Gentoo

qutebrowser is available in the main repository and can be installed with:

# emerge -av qutebrowser

Make sure you have python3_4 in your PYTHON_TARGETS (/etc/portage/make.conf) and rebuild your system (emerge -uDNav @world) if necessary.

On Void Linux

qutebrowser is available in the official repositories and can be installed with:

# xbps-install qutebrowser

On NixOS

Nixpkgs collection contains pkgs.qutebrowser since June 2015. You can install it with:

$ nix-env -i qutebrowser

On Windows

There are different ways to install qutebrowser on Windows:

Prebuilt binaries

Prebuilt standalone packages and MSI installers are built for every release.

Chocolatey package

PackageManagement PowerShell module

PS C:\> Install-Package qutebrowser

Chocolatey’s client

C:\> choco install qutebrowser

Manual install

Use the installer from python.org to get Python 3 (be sure to install pip).
Use the installer from Riverbank computing to get Qt and PyQt5.
Install tox via pip:

$ pip install tox

Then install qutebrowser via tox.

On OS X

To install qutebrowser on OS X, you’ll want a package manager, e.g. Homebrew or MacPorts. Also make sure, you have XCode installed to compile PyQt5 in a later step.

$ brew install python3 pyqt5
$ pip3.5 install qutebrowser

if you are using Homebrew. For MacPorts, run:

$ sudo port install python34 py34-jinja2 asciidoc py34-pygments py34-pyqt5
$ sudo pip3.4 install qutebrowser

The preferences for qutebrowser are stored in ~/Library/Preferences/qutebrowser, the application data is stored in ~/Library/Application Support/qutebrowser.

Packagers

There are example .desktop and icon files provided. They would go in the standard location for your distro (/usr/share/applications and /usr/share/pixmaps for example).

The normal setup.py install doesn’t install these files, so you’ll have to do it as part of the packaging process.