Install

Installing pre-built packages (Linux-only)

If you have a Linux system you may install the deltachat binary “wheel” packages without any “build-from-source” steps. Otherwise you need to compile the Delta Chat bindings yourself.

We recommend to first create a fresh Python virtual environment and activate it in your shell:

python -m venv env
source env/bin/activate

Afterwards, invoking python or pip install only modifies files in your env directory and leaves your system installation alone.

For Linux we build wheels for all releases and push them to a python package index. To install the latest release:

pip install deltachat

To verify it worked:

python -c "import deltachat"

Installing bindings from source

Install Rust and Cargo first. The easiest is probably to use rustup.

Bootstrap Rust and Cargo by using rustup:

curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh

Then clone the deltachat-core-rust repo:

git clone https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-core-rust
cd deltachat-core-rust

To install the Delta Chat Python bindings make sure you have Python3 installed. E.g. on Debian-based systems apt install python3 python3-pip python3-venv should give you a usable python installation.

First, build the core library:

cargo build --release -p deltachat_ffi --features jsonrpc

jsonrpc feature is required even if not used by the bindings because deltachat.h includes JSON-RPC functions unconditionally.

Create the virtual environment and activate it:

python -m venv env
source env/bin/activate

Build and install the bindings:

export DCC_RS_DEV="$PWD"
export DCC_RS_TARGET=release
python -m pip install ./python

DCC_RS_DEV environment variable specifies the location of the core development tree. If this variable is not set, libdeltachat library and deltachat.h header are expected to be installed system-wide.

When DCC_RS_DEV is set, DCC_RS_TARGET specifies the build profile name to look up the artifacts in the target directory. In this case setting it can be skipped because DCC_RS_TARGET=release is the default.