Installation Instructions

cmd2 works on Linux, macOS, and Windows. It requires Python 3.10 or higher, pip, and setuptools. If you've got all that, then you can just:

$ pip install cmd2

Note

Depending on how and where you have installed Python on your system and on what OS you are using, you may need to have administrator or root privileges to install Python packages. If this is the case, take the necessary steps required to run the commands in this section as root/admin, e.g.: on most Linux or Mac systems, you can precede them with sudo:

$ sudo pip install <package_name>

Info

You can also use an alternative Python package manager such as uv, but doing so is beyond the scope of this installation guide. The cmd2 developers love and highly recommend uv and use it for the development of cmd2 itself. But chances are if you are a sophisticated enough Python developer to be using uv, you don't need us to tell you how to use it

Prerequisites

If you have Python >=3.10 installed from python.org, you will already have pip and setuptools, but may need to upgrade to the latest versions:

On Linux or OS X:

$ pip install -U pip setuptools

On Windows:

C:\> python -m pip install -U pip setuptools

Install from PyPI

pip is the recommended installer. Installing packages from PyPI with pip is easy:

$ pip install cmd2

This will install the required 3^rd-party dependencies, if necessary.

Install from GitHub

The latest version of cmd2 can be installed directly from the main branch on GitHub using pip:

$ pip install -U git+git://github.com/python-cmd2/cmd2.git

Install from Debian or Ubuntu repos

We recommend installing from pip, but if you wish to install from Debian or Ubuntu repos this can be done with apt-get.

For Python 3:

$ sudo apt-get install python3-cmd2

This will also install the required 3^rd-party dependencies.

Warning

Versions of cmd2 before 2.0.0 should be considered to be of unstable "beta" quality and should not be relied upon for production use. If you cannot get a version >= 2.0.0 from your OS repository, then we recommend installing from either PyPI or GitHub - see Pip Install or Install from GitHub.

Upgrading cmd2

Upgrade an already installed cmd2 to the latest version from PyPI:

pip install -U cmd2

This will upgrade to the newest stable version of cmd2 and will also upgrade any dependencies if necessary.

Uninstalling cmd2

If you wish to permanently uninstall cmd2, this can also easily be done with pip:

$ pip uninstall cmd2

readline Considerations

cmd2 heavily relies on Python's built-in readline module for its tab completion capabilities. Tab completion for cmd2 applications is only tested against GNU Readline or libraries fully compatible with it. It does not work properly with the NetBSD Editline library (libedit) which is similar, but not identical to GNU Readline. cmd2 will disable all tab-completion support if an incompatible version of readline is found.

When installed using pip, uv, or similar Python packaging tool on either macOS or Windows, cmd2 will automatically install a compatible version of readline.

Most Linux operating systems come with a compatible version of readline. However, if you are using a tool like uv to install Python on your system and configure a virtual environment, uv installed versions of Python come with libedit. If you are using cmd2 on Linux with a version of Python installed via uv, you will likely need to manually add the gnureadline Python module to your uv virtual environment.

uv pip install gnureadline

macOS comes with the libedit library which is similar, but not identical, to GNU Readline. Tab completion for cmd2 applications is only tested against GNU Readline. In this case you just need to install the gnureadline Python package which is statically linked against GNU Readline:

$ pip install -U gnureadline