Manual:Pywikibot/Installation

This page will help you get started with Pywikibot, either on your own computer, on Tool Labs, or using Pywikibot: A Web Shell (PAWS).

Install Python
Download and install Python from http://www.python.org/downloads/.

If you already have Python installed, check if your version is recent enough by running  in a console.

If you have Python 2.7.2 or higher installed, or Python 3.3 or higher, your version of Python is recent enough.

Downloading Pywikibot
Download Pywikibot 2.0rc5: .tar.gz, .zip.

Alternatively, nightly downloads are available at https://tools.wmflabs.org/pywikibot/.

Unpack this file, for example in  or.

Alternatively, if you want to retrieve the latest version from gerrit, see Manual:Pywikibot/Gerrit.

Updating
Stable releases are released every three months or so, and are available at the same location.

Before installing it, backup your configuration files and scripts (, any family file, or custom script that you might have created, and any current dump XML file you're using for a wiki).

Unpack the new version over the old version, overwriting all files.

Configuring Pywikibot
Open a terminal and change directory (cd) to where you unpacked pywikibot.


 * Unix-like (Linux/BSD/Solaris): Start 'Terminal' (typically under 'System Tools' in the menu), and run:


 * Windows: Start 'Command Prompt' (typically under 'Accessories » System Tools' or 'System'), and run:

Of course substituting the location where you unpacked pywikibot.

Follow the prompts to configure pywikibot.

After this create somewhere file with text like, open user-config.py in Pywikibot folder and insert in this file   line.

Use on third-party wikis
Pywikibot is pre-configured for a large number of wikis, but possibly not for the one you want to work on.

See  for how to configure Pywikibot for your wiki.

More configuration options
Pywikibot provides a wide range of configuration options to change the behavior of your bot.

You can change these settings in the file 'user-config.py'.

See config2.py for a list of all parameters you can use.

Running a script
Pywikibot comes packaged with a large number of scripts in the scripts directory.

You can run all of these using

A list of all scripts is available at .

Dependencies
Most scripts work do not require any additional packages, but a few of them will not work without.

These are listed in requirements.txt.

To install dependencies, use pip, which is already installed if you have a recent version of Python. Run the following commands to install packages:

Or the following command to install all of the recommended packages: