Installing From PyPI

If you are installing locally…

$ pip install grpcio

Else system wide (on Ubuntu)…

$ sudo pip install grpcio

If you’re on Windows make sure that you installed the pip.exe component when you installed Python (if not go back and install it!) then invoke:

$ pip.exe install grpcio

Windows users may need to invoke pip.exe from a command line ran as administrator.

n.b. On Windows and on Mac OS X one must have a recent release of pip to retrieve the proper wheel from PyPI. Be sure to upgrade to the latest version!

Installing From Source

Building from source requires that you have the Python headers (usually a package named python-dev).

$ export REPO_ROOT=grpc  # REPO_ROOT can be any directory of your choice
$ git clone -b RELEASE_TAG_HERE https://github.com/grpc/grpc $REPO_ROOT
$ cd $REPO_ROOT
$ git submodule update --init

# To include systemd socket-activation feature in the build,
# first install the `libsystemd-dev` package, then :
$ export GRPC_PYTHON_BUILD_WITH_SYSTEMD=1

# For the next two commands do `sudo pip install` if you get permission-denied errors
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
$ GRPC_PYTHON_BUILD_WITH_CYTHON=1 pip install .

You cannot currently install Python from source on Windows. Things might work out for you in MSYS2 (follow the Linux instructions), but it isn’t officially supported at the moment.

Troubleshooting

Help, I …

• … see the following error on some platforms

  /tmp/pip-build-U8pSsr/cython/Cython/Plex/Scanners.c:4:20: fatal error: Python.h: No such file or directory
  #include "Python.h"
                  ^
  compilation terminated.
  

  You can fix it by installing python-dev package. i.e

  sudo apt-get install python-dev
  

Versioning

gRPC Python is developed in a monorepo shared with implementations of gRPC in other programming languages. While the minor versions are released in lock-step with other languages in the repo (e.g. 1.63.0 is guaranteed to exist for all languages), patch versions may be specific to only a single language. For example, if 1.63.1 is a C++-specific patch, 1.63.1 may not be uploaded to PyPi. As a result, it is __not__ a good assumption that the latest patch for a given minor version on Github is also the latest patch for that same minor version on PyPi.