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: as a command line executable and as a
desktop application.  The desktop version also contains the command
line executable, but it also 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 in the menu bar on *Lektor ➤ Install Shell Command*.

## Command Line Application

If you do not want to install the desktop app then you can just install the command
line executable.  This runs on most 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, also `python-dev`, `libssl-dev` and
  `libffi-dev` is required on Ubuntu)
* ImageMagick (`brew install imagemagick` can get you this on OS X and on
  Ubuntu the `imagemagick` package needs to be installed. 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 those installed and have 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'))
```

## pip

Alternatively you can manually install the command line version with
`virtualenv` if you know how that works.  Note that this method is *heavily
discouraged* for anything other than advanced use cases such as build servers.

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

!!!! When we say this installation type is discouraged we mean it.  The reason
is that it encourages uses of Lektor which are entirely unsupported by us.
Lektor actively manages virtualenvs for plugin installations in very specific
ways and this might or might not work in your setup.  We support pip
installations for deployment environments and local development only.

## 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 .
```