lektor-website/content/docs/installation/contents.lr

title: Installation
---
summary: How to install Lektor on your computer.
---
sort_key: 50
---
body:

Lektor comes in two flavors: the command line executable as well as as a
desktop application.  The desktop version also contains the command line
executable however it bundles together all dependencies of Lektor in an
easy to use package which heavily simplifies installation.

## Desktop Application

Currently the desktop application is only available for OS X and can be
[downloaded from the Lektor website](../../downloads/).  It comes as a downloadable
disk image that you can mount which contains one application by the name of
`Lektor.app`.  Just drag it into your `Applications` folder and you are good to
go.

If you also want access to the command line tools just launch `Lektor.app`
and then click on *Lektor ➤ Install Shell Command*.

## Command Line Application

If you do not want to install the desktop app you can just install the command
line executable.  This one runs on more operating systems (OSX, Linux and
Windows) but the installation is a bit more involved.

You need to make sure you have the following software installed on your computer:

* Python 2.7 (**not** Python 3.x)
* ImageMagick (`brew install imagemagick` or `apt-get install imagemagick`
  can get you this on OS X and Ubuntu respectively, on Windows do `choco install imagemagick`, which requires [chocolatey :ext](https://chocolatey.org/), or download from  [here :ext](http://www.imagemagick.org))

Once you have that installed and made sure that they are on your `PATH` you can get Lektor installed with our
installation script:

```
$ curl -sf https://www.getlektor.com/install.sh | sh
```
For Windows you can use the `command prompt`:
```
C:\> @powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "iex ((new-object net.webclient).DownloadString('https://getlektor.com/install.ps1'))" && SET PATH=%PATH%;%LocalAppData%\lektor-cli
```
but you can also do it directly in `Powershell`:
```
PS C:\> iex ((new-object net.webclient).DownloadString('https://getlektor.com/install.ps1'))
```

Alternatively you can manually install it with `virtualenv` if you know
how that works:

```
$ virtualenv venv
$ . venv/bin/activate
$ pip install Lektor
```

## Development Version

If you want to install the development version of Lektor you can do so.  It's
the same as with installing the command line application but instead of
using PyPI you install directly from git and you need to have `npm` installed
to build the admin UI:

```
$ git clone https://github.com/lektor/lektor
$ cd lektor
$ make build-js
$ virtualenv venv
$ . venv/bin/activate
$ pip install --editable .
```