qutebrowser's primary maintainer, The-Compiler, is currently working part-time on qutebrowser, funded by donations.
To sustain this for a long time, your help is needed! See the GitHub Sponsors page or alternative donation methods for more information. Depending on your sign-up date and how long you keep a certain level, you can get qutebrowser t-shirts, stickers and more!
Installing qutebrowser
Official vs. community-maintained
Only the following releases are done by qutebrowser’s maintainer directly:
-
Source packages in this GitHub repository and on PyPI
-
Windows and macOS prebuilt binaries in the GitHub Releases
-
The
qutebrowser-git
package in the Archlinux AUR -
Installing in a virtualenv from the git repository.
All other packaging is done by the community, so in case of outdated/broken packages, you will need to reach out to the respective maintainers. Note that some distributions (notably, Debian Stable and Ubuntu) do only update qutebrowser and the underlying QtWebEngine when there’s a new release of the distribution, typically once all couple of months to years.
On Debian / Ubuntu / Linux Mint / …
With those distributions, qutebrowser is in the official repositories, and you
can install it with apt install qutebrowser
.
However, when using a stable variant (e.g. Debian Stable / Ubuntu LTS / Linux Mint), note that your versions of qutebrowser and the underlying QtWebEngine will only be updated when there’s a new release of your distribution (e.g. upgrading from Ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04):
-
Ubuntu 20.04, Linux Mint 20: qutebrowser 1.10.1, QtWebEngine 5.12.8 (based on Chromium 69 from 2018)
-
Ubuntu 22.04, Linux Mint 21: qutebrowser 2.5.0, QtWebEngine 5.15.9 (based on Chromium 87 from 2020)
-
Debian Bookworm: qutebrowser 2.5.3, QtWebEngine 5.15.13 (based on Chromium 87 from 2020)
The old versions of the underlying Chromium will lead to various compatibility issues. Additionally, QtWebEngine on all Debian-based distributions is not covered by Debian’s security support.
It’s recommended to install qutebrowser in a virtualenv with a newer PyQt/Qt binary instead.
If you need proprietary codec support or use an architecture not supported by Qt
binaries, starting with Ubuntu 22.04 and Debian Bookworm, it’s possible to
install Qt 6 via apt. By using scripts/mkvenv.py
with --pyqt-type link
you get a
newer qutebrowser running with:
-
Ubuntu 22.04, Linux Mint 21: QtWebEngine 6.2.4 (based on Chromium 90 from mid-2021)
-
Debian Bookworm: QtWebEngine 6.4.2 (based on Chromium 102 from mid-2022)
Note you’ll need some basic libraries to use the virtualenv-installed PyQt:
# apt install --no-install-recommends git ca-certificates python3 python3-venv libgl1 libxkbcommon-x11-0 libegl1-mesa libfontconfig1 libglib2.0-0 libdbus-1-3 libxcb-cursor0 libxcb-icccm4 libxcb-keysyms1 libxcb-shape0 libnss3 libxcomposite1 libxdamage1 libxrender1 libxrandr2 libxtst6 libxi6 libasound2
Additional hints
-
On Ubuntu 20.04 / Linux Mint 20 / Debian Bullseye, no OpenSSL 3 is available. However, Qt 6.5 moved to OpenSSL 3 for its binary builds. Thus, you will either need to live with
:adblock-update
and:download
being broken, or use--pyqt-version 6.4
for thescripts/mkvenv.py
script to get an older Qt. -
If running from git, run the following to generate the documentation for the
:help
command (thescripts/mkvenv.py
script used with a virtualenv install already does this for you):$ pip install -r misc/requirements/requirements-docs.txt # or install asciidoc manually $ python3 scripts/asciidoc2html.py
-
If you prefer using QtWebKit, there’s QtWebKit 5.212 available in those distributions. Note however that it is based on an upstream WebKit from September 2016 with known security issues and no sandboxing or process isolation.
-
If video or sound don’t work with QtWebKit, try installing the gstreamer plugins:
# apt install gstreamer1.0-plugins-{bad,base,good,ugly}
Note those are only needed with QtWebKit, not with the (default) QtWebEngine backend.
On Fedora
qutebrowser is available in the official repositories:
# dnf install qutebrowser
Additional hints
Fedora only ships free software in the repositories. To be able to play videos with proprietary codecs with QtWebEngine, you will need to install an additional package from the RPM Fusion Free repository. For more information see https://rpmfusion.org/Configuration.
# dnf install qt5-qtwebengine-freeworld
It’s currently unknown what the Qt 6 equivalent of this is.
On Archlinux
qutebrowser is available in the official [community] repository.
# pacman -S qutebrowser
There is also a -git version available in the AUR: qutebrowser-git.
You can install it using makepkg
like this:
$ git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/qutebrowser-git.git
$ cd qutebrowser-git
$ makepkg -si
$ cd ..
$ rm -r qutebrowser-git
or you could use an AUR helper like yay, e.g.
yay -S qutebrowser-git
.
If video or sound don’t work with QtWebKit, try installing the gstreamer plugins:
# pacman -S gst-plugins-{base,good,bad,ugly} gst-libav
On Gentoo
qutebrowser is available in the main repository and can be installed with:
# emerge -av qutebrowser
If video or sound don’t work with QtWebKit, try installing the gstreamer plugins:
# emerge -av gst-plugins-{base,good,bad,ugly,libav}
To be able to play videos with proprietary codecs with QtWebEngine, you will
need to turn off the bindist
flag for dev-qt/qtwebengine
.
See the Gentoo Wiki for more information.
To be able to use Kerberos authentication, you will need to turn on the
kerberos
USE-flag system-wide and re-emerge dev-qt/qtwebengine
after that.
See the Troubleshooting section in Gentoo Wiki for more information.
On Void Linux
qutebrowser is available in the official repositories and can be installed with:
# xbps-install qutebrowser
On NixOS
Nixpkgs collection contains pkgs.qutebrowser
since June 2015. You can install
it with:
$ nix-env -i qutebrowser
On openSUSE
There are prebuilt RPMs available at OBS.
On Slackware
qutebrowser is available in the 3rd party repository at slackbuilds.org
An easy way to install it is with sbopkg (frontend for slackbuilds.org) available at sbopkg.org
sbopkg can be run with a dialog screen interface, or via command line options.
After installing the latest sbopkg package, choose your release version, and sync the repo.
sbopkg -V 14.2
sbopkg -r
Generate a queue file for qutebrowser and dependencies:
sqg -p qutebrowser
Then load the queue in the dialog queue menu or via:
PYTHON3=yes sbopkg -i qutebrowser
If you use the dialog screen you can deselect any already-installed packages that you don’t need/want to rebuild before starting the build process.
Via Flatpak
qutebrowser is available
on Flathub
as org.qutebrowser.qutebrowser
. See the
qutebrowser Flatpak documentation
for more information about setting up certain features with the Flatpak sandbox.
On FreeBSD
qutebrowser is in FreeBSD ports.
It can be installed with:
# cd /usr/ports/www/qutebrowser
# make install clean
At present, precompiled packages are not available for this port, and QtWebEngine backend is also not available.
On Windows
Note
|
As an additional resource, see Infinite Ink: Installing qutebrowser on Windows. |
There are different ways to install qutebrowser on Windows:
Prebuilt binaries
Prebuilt standalone packages and installers are built for every release.
Note that you’ll need to upgrade to new versions manually (subscribe to the qutebrowser-announce mailinglist to get notified on new releases). You can install a newer version without uninstalling the older one.
The binary release ships with a QtWebEngine built without proprietary codec support. To get support for e.g. h264/mp4 videos, you’ll need to build QtWebEngine from source yourself with support for that enabled.
Nightly builds
If you want to test out new features before an official qutebrowser release, automated nightly builds are available. To download them, open the latest run (usually the first one), then download the archive at the bottom of the page.
Those builds also include variants with debug logging enabled, which can be useful to track down issues.
Note
|
Due to GitHub limitations, you need to be signed in with a GitHub account to download the files. |
Package managers
-
PackageManagement PowerShell module
PS C:\> Install-Package qutebrowser
-
Chocolatey package with
choco
:
C:\> choco install qutebrowser
-
Scoop’s client
C:\> scoop bucket add extras
C:\> scoop install qutebrowser
Manual install
Use the installer from python.org to get Python 3 (be sure to install pip).
On macOS
Prebuilt binary
The easiest way to install qutebrowser on macOS is to use the prebuilt .app
files from the
release page.
Note that you’ll need to upgrade to new versions manually (subscribe to the qutebrowser-announce mailinglist to get notified on new releases).
The binary release ships with a QtWebEngine built without proprietary codec support. To get support for e.g. h264/mp4 videos, you’ll need to build QtWebEngine from source yourself with support for that enabled.
Note
|
Currently, qutebrowser does not use macOS' Notarization, due to PyInstaller issues (as well as the requirement to pay USD 100 per year to Apple). Depending on your system settings, this might lead to errors such as "qutebrowser.app can’t be opened because Apple cannot check it for malicious software." or "can’t be opened because it is from an unidentified developer". You should be able to open the .app by right-clicking it and selecting "Open", see the macOS documentation for details. |
$ brew install qutebrowser
Nightly builds
If you want to test out new features before an official qutebrowser release, automated nightly builds are available. To download them, open the latest run (usually the first one), then download the archive at the bottom of the page.
Those builds also include variants with debug logging enabled, which can be useful to track down issues.
Note
|
Due to GitHub limitations, you need to be signed in with a GitHub account to download the files. |
Packagers
qutebrowser ships with a
Makefile
intended for packagers. This installs system-wide files in a proper locations,
so it should be preferred to the usual setup.py install
or pip install
invocation.
Installing qutebrowser with virtualenv
Important
|
Before January 2020, this section used to be about installing
qutebrowser via tox which is a wrapper around virtualenv . Now, a dedicated
script is used instead. |
A virtual environment (virtualenv, venv) allows Python packages to be installed in an isolated location for a particular application, rather than being installed globally.
The scripts/mkvenv.py
script in this repository can be used to create a
virtualenv for qutebrowser and install it (including all dependencies) there.
The next couple of sections will explain the most common use-cases - run
scripts/mkvenv.py
with --help
to see all available options.
Getting the repository
First of all, clone the repository using git and switch into the repository folder:
$ git clone https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser.git
$ cd qutebrowser
Installing dependencies (including Qt)
Using a Qt installed via virtualenv needs a couple of system-wide libraries. See the Debian-based distributions section for details about which libraries are required.
Then run the install script:
$ python3 scripts/mkvenv.py
This installs all needed Python dependencies in a .venv
subfolder
(which subdirectory the environment is created in is configurable via the
--venv-dir
flag).
This comes with an up-to-date Qt/PyQt including a pre-compiled QtWebEngine binary, but has a few caveats:
-
Make sure your
python3
is Python 3.9 or newer, otherwise you’ll get a "No matching distribution found" error and/or qutebrowser will not run. -
It only works on 64-bit x86 systems, with other architectures you’ll get the same error.
-
It comes with a QtWebEngine compiled without proprietary codec support (such as h.264).
See the next section for an alternative install method which might help with those issues but result in an older Qt version.
You can specify a Qt/PyQt version with the --pyqt-version
flag, see
scripts/mkvenv.py --help
for a list of available versions. By default, the
latest version which plays well with qutebrowser is used.
Note
|
If the Qt smoke test fails with a "This application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialized." message, most likely a system-wide library is missing. Pay attention to a QLibraryPrivate::loadPlugin failed on … line for details. |
Installing dependencies (system-wide Qt)
Alternatively, you can use scripts/mkvenv.py --pyqt-type link
to symlink
your local PyQt/Qt install instead of installing PyQt in the virtualenv.
However, unless you have a new QtWebKit or QtWebEngine available, qutebrowser
will not work. It also typically means you’ll be using an older release of
QtWebEngine.
On Windows, run set PYTHON=C:\path\to\python.exe
(CMD) or $Env:PYTHON =
"..."
(Powershell) first.
There is a third mode, scripts/mkvenv.py --pyqt-type source
which uses a
system-wide Qt but builds PyQt from source. In most scenarios, this shouldn’t
be needed.
Creating a wrapper script
Running scripts/mkvenv.py
does not install a system-wide qutebrowser
script. You can launch qutebrowser by doing:
.venv/bin/python3 -m qutebrowser
You can create a simple wrapper script to start qutebrowser somewhere in your
$PATH
(e.g. /usr/local/bin/qutebrowser
or ~/bin/qutebrowser
):
#!/bin/bash
~/path/to/qutebrowser/.venv/bin/python3 -m qutebrowser "$@"
Updating
If you cloned the git repository, run scripts/mkvenv.py --update
which will
take care of updating the code (via git pull
) and recreating the environment
with the newest dependencies.
Alternatively, you can update your local copy of the code (e.g. by pulling the git repo, or extracting a new version) and the virtualenv should automatically use the updated versions. However, dependencies won’t be updated that way.