Install psutil

Linux, Windows, macOS (wheels)

Pre-compiled wheels are distributed for these platforms, so you usually won’t need a C compiler. Install psutil with:

pip install psutil

Or with uv:

uv add psutil

If wheels are not available for your platform or architecture, or you wish to build & install psutil from sources, keep reading.

Compile psutil from source

UNIX

On all UNIX systems you can use the install-sysdeps.sh script. This will install the system dependencies necessary to compile psutil from sources. You can invoke this script from the Makefile as:

make install-sysdeps

After system deps are installed, you can compile and install psutil with:

make build
make install

…or this, which will fetch the latest source distribution from PyPI:

pip install --no-binary :all: psutil

Linux

Debian / Ubuntu:

sudo apt install gcc python3-dev
pip install --no-binary :all: psutil

RedHat / CentOS:

sudo yum install gcc python3-devel
pip install --no-binary :all: psutil

Arch:

sudo pacman -S gcc python
pip install --no-binary :all: psutil

Alpine:

sudo apk add gcc python3-dev musl-dev linux-headers
pip install --no-binary :all: psutil

Windows

To build or install psutil from source on Windows, you need to have Visual Studio 2017 or later installed. For detailed instructions, see the CPython Developer Guide.
MinGW is not supported for building psutil on Windows.
To build directly from the source tarball (.tar.gz) on PYPI, run:
```
pip install --no-binary :all: psutil
```
If you want to clone psutil’s Git repository and build / develop locally, first install Git for Windows and launch a Git Bash shell. This provides a Unix-like environment where make works.
Once inside Git Bash, you can run the usual make commands:
```
make build
make install
```

macOS

Install Xcode first:

xcode-select --install
pip install --no-binary :all: psutil

FreeBSD

pkg install python3 gcc
python3 -m pip install psutil

OpenBSD

export PKG_PATH=https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/`uname -r`/packages/`uname -m`/
pkg_add -v python3 gcc
pip install psutil

NetBSD

Assuming Python 3.11:

export PKG_PATH="https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/`uname -m`/`uname -r`/All"
pkg_add -v pkgin
pkgin install python311-* gcc12-* py311-setuptools-* py311-pip-*
python3.11 -m pip install psutil

Sun Solaris

If cc compiler is not installed create a symbolic link to gcc:

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/gcc /usr/local/bin/cc

Install:

pkg install gcc
pip install psutil

Troubleshooting

Install pip

If you don’t have pip you can install it with wget:

wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py -O - | python3

…or with curl:

python3 < <(curl -s https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py)

On Windows, download pip, open cmd.exe and install it with:

py get-pip.py

Permission errors (UNIX)

If you want to install psutil system-wide and you bump into permission errors either run as root user or prepend sudo:

sudo pip install psutil