Introduction

psutil is a module providing an interface for retrieving information on running processes in a portable way by using Python. It currently supports Linux, OS X, FreeBSD and Windows.

psutil website is at http://code.google.com/p/psutil/

The following document describes how to compile and install psutil from sources on different platforms.

Using easy_install

The easiest way to install psutil from sources is using easy_install. Get the latest easy_install version from http://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools and just run:

python easy_install psutil

This should get the most updated psutil version from the Python pypi repository, unpack it, compile it and install it automatically.

Installing on Windows using mingw32

After the mingw [1] environment is properly set up on your system you can compile Windows sources by entering:

setup.py build -c mingw32

To compile and install just append the "install" keyword at the end of the command line above, like this:

setup.py build -c mingw32 install

It might be possible that distutils will complain about missing gcc executable. That means you have to add mingw bin PATH variable first. Entering this line in the command prompt should do the work:

SET PATH=C:\MinGW\bin;%PATH%

NOTE: this assumes MinGW is installed in C:\MinGW, if not simply replace the path in the command above with an appropriate location.

[1] http://www.mingw.org/

Installing on Windows using Visual Studio

To use Visual Studio to install psutil, you must have the same version of Visual Studio used to compile your installation of Python. For older versions of Python that will be Visual Studio 2003. For 2.6 and later it should be Visual Studio 2008. If you do not have the requisite version of Visual Studio available then it is recommended to use MinGW to compile psutil instead.

If you do have Visual Studio installed, you can use the basic distutils commands:

setup.py build

or to install and build:

setup.py install

distutils should take care of any necessary magic to compile from there.

Installing on OS X

OS X installation from source will require gcc which you can obtain as part of the 'XcodeTools' installer from Apple. Then you can run the standard distutils commands:

to build only:

./setup.py build

to install and build:

./setup.py install

NOTE: due to developer's hardware limitations psutil has only been compiled and tested on OS X 10.4.11 so may or may not work on other versions.

Installing on FreeBSD

The same compiler used to install Python must be present on the system in order to build modules using distutils. Assuming it is installed, you can build using the standard distutils commands:

build only:

./setup.py build

install and build:

./setup.py install

Installing on Linux

Standard distutils installation steps should apply here. At the current time the Linux port of psutil does not require any C modules, so can be installed without need for a compiler using disutils:

install/build:

./setup.py install