Installation

OS/distro packages

The following packages are community-contributed and were up-to-date at the time of writing:

We only support the latest version of vdirsyncer, which is at the time of this writing 0.19.3.dev14+g301aa0e. Please do not file bugs if you use an older version.

Some distributions have multiple release channels. Debian and Fedora for example have a “stable” release channel that ships an older version of vdirsyncer. Those versions aren’t supported either.

If there is no suitable package for your distribution, you’ll need to install vdirsyncer manually. There is an easy command to copy-and-paste for this as well, but you should be aware of its consequences.

Manual installation

If your distribution doesn’t provide a package for vdirsyncer, you still can use Python’s package manager “pip”. First, you’ll have to check that the following things are installed:

  • Python 3.7 to 3.11 and pip.
  • libxml and libxslt
  • zlib
  • Linux or macOS. Windows is not supported, see issue #535.

On Linux systems, using the distro’s package manager is the best way to do this, for example, using Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install libxml2 libxslt1.1 zlib1g python3

Then you have several options. The following text applies for most Python software by the way.

pipx: The clean, easy way

pipx is a new package manager for Python-based software that automatically sets up a virtual environment for each program you install. Assuming you have it installed on your operating system, you can do:

pipx install vdirsyncer

and ~/.local/pipx/venvs/vdirsyncer will be your new vdirsyncer installation. To update vdirsyncer to the latest version:

pipx upgrade vdirsyncer

If you’re done with vdirsyncer, you can do:

pipx uninstall vdirsyncer

and vdirsyncer will be uninstalled, including its dependencies.

The dirty, easy way

If pipx is not available on your distirbution, the easiest way to install vdirsyncer at this point would be to run:

pip install --ignore-installed vdirsyncer

This method has a major flaw though: Pip doesn’t keep track of the files it installs. Vdirsyncer’s files would be located somewhere in ~/.local/lib/python*, but you can’t possibly know which packages were installed as dependencies of vdirsyncer and which ones were not, should you decide to uninstall it. In other words, using pip that way would pollute your home directory.

The clean, hard way

There is a way to install Python software without scattering stuff across your filesystem: virtualenv. There are a lot of resources on how to use it, the simplest possible way would look something like:

virtualenv ~/vdirsyncer_env
~/vdirsyncer_env/bin/pip install vdirsyncer
alias vdirsyncer="~/vdirsyncer_env/bin/vdirsyncer"

You’ll have to put the last line into your .bashrc or .bash_profile.

This method has two advantages:

  • It separately installs all Python packages into ~/vdirsyncer_env/, without relying on the system packages. This works around OS- or distro-specific issues.
  • You can delete ~/vdirsyncer_env/ to uninstall vdirsyncer entirely.