PyQt - Introduction

PyQt is a GUI widgets toolkit. It is a Python interface for Qt, one of the most powerful, and popular cross-platform GUI library. PyQt was developed by RiverBank Computing Ltd. The latest version of PyQt can be downloaded from its official website − riverbankcomputing.com

PyQt API is a set of modules containing a large number of classes and functions. While QtCore module contains non-GUI functionality for working with file and directory etc., QtGui module contains all the graphical controls. In addition, there are modules for working with XML (QtXml), SVG (QtSvg), and SQL (QtSql), etc.

Supporting Environments

PyQt is compatible with all the popular operating systems including Windows, Linux, and Mac OS. It is dual licensed, available under GPL as well as commercial license.

Windows

You can download and install an appropriate installer from the above download link corresponding to Python version (2.7 or 3.4) and hardware architecture (32 bit or 64 bit). Note that there are two versions of PyQt that are available namely, PyQt 4.8 and PyQt 5.5.

While PyQt4 is available for Python 2 as well as Python 3, PyQt5 can be used along with Python 3.* only.

PyQt4 Windows Binaries

PyQt5 Windows Binaries

Linux

For Ubuntu or any other debian Linux distribution, use the following command to install PyQt −

sudo apt-get install python-qt4
or 
sudo apt-get install pyqt5-dev-tools

You can also build from the source code available on the ‘download’ page.

Mac OS

PyQtX project (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pyqtx/) hosts binaries of PyQt for Mac. Use Homebrew installer as per the following command −

brew install pyqt