Installation — PsychoPy®

Tried and tested, PsychoPy Standalone is the best option for an install that “just works”.
We will continue to release new versions until PsychoPy Studio is stable enough to replace it.
PsychoPy Standalone 2026.2.5
PsychoPy Studio is a full rebuild of the PsychoPy desktop app using web-based libraries (Svelte and Electron).
The underlying experiment engine is still Python, but Studio provides a smoother, more user-friendly interface and better version independence with useVersion.
PsychoPy Studio 2026.2.5
Tried and tested, PsychoPy Standalone is the best option for an install that “just works”.
We will continue to release new versions until PsychoPy Studio is stable enough to replace it.
PsychoPy Standalone 2026.2.5
PsychoPy Studio is a full rebuild of the PsychoPy desktop app using web-based libraries (Svelte and Electron).
The underlying experiment engine is still Python, but Studio provides a smoother, more user-friendly interface and better version independence with useVersion.
PsychoPy Studio 2026.2.5
Make sure curl is installed (most distros include it by default).
Show installer options:
Start installer with GUI:
Note: zenity must be installed for GUI mode.
Start installer without GUI:
For help, troubleshooting, or to report issues, visit the psychopy_linux_installer GitHub page.
For uninstall instructions, see the Uninstall section of the README.
PsychoPy Studio is a full rebuild of the PsychoPy desktop app using web-based libraries (Svelte and Electron).
The underlying experiment engine is still Python, but Studio provides a smoother, more user-friendly interface and better version independence with useVersion.
Plus, it’s much easier to install on Linux!
PsychoPy Studio 2026.2.5
For all versions see the PsychoPy releases on github
PsychoPy® is distributed under the GPL3 license
See below for options if you want to run the Python app but don’t want to use the Standalone releases. Before any of these options, you should setup a Python environment of the correct version for the version of PsychoPy you want to install.
The version of Python on which PsychoPy runs best has increased with successive versions, so before installing PsychoPy you should check that you have the correct version of Python installed. Below are the versions at which PsychoPy updated to support different Python versions:
Once you know what version you want, you can install Python by whatever method you prefer. Installers are provided on the Python website, or you can use a package manager like UV to install Python along with the packages.
pip is the package manager recommended by Python, you can read more about it here. UV is a newer tool which handles packages and Python environments in one interface, you can read more about it here. When you first open PsychoPy Studio and it sets up a Python environment for you, UV is what it uses, so we take great care to make sure UV installs specifically work smoothly! We include these together as UV is intentionally similar to pip, so the process of installing via either manager is extremely similar.
Installing in either UV or pip can be done with a single command in the terminal:
This will install both the PsychoPy library (psychopy) and the Python app (psychopy-app), and all their dependencies. To install just the library (for running experiments as scripts), just remove psychopy-app from the command. To install without any dependencies (if you prefer to set them up yourself), just add --no-deps to the end of the command.
This is a user-contributed option and may or may not work.
On a MacOS machine, brew can be used to install PsychoPy®:
Support for conda was contributed and is badly outdated but you may be able to get it working using pip install within your conda environment.
Generally we recommend you use StandalonePsychoPy instead, for experiment creation, as an entirely separate app, and use your conda installation for other (e.g. analysis) scripts.
Alternatively if someone wants to jump in and get things working here again that would be appreciated by other users I’m sure.
Installing just the PsychoPy library on Linux is the same as installing on Windows or Mac, see instructions for uv/pip above. However, the PsychoPy Python app uses wxPython, which is notorious for poor Linux support, so installing that on Linux is often rather painful. For this reason, we strongly recommend using PsychoPy Studio if you’re on Linux.
If you do need the Python app, here are the legacy instructions for installing it on Linux:
We are aware that the procedure for installing on Linux is often rather painful. This is not the platform that the core PsychoPy developers currently use so support is less good than on some platforms. Feel free to jump in and help improve it as a contributor! :-)
There used to be neurodebian and Gentoo packages for PsychoPy® but these are both badly outdated. We’d recommend you first make sure you have a compatible Python version installed (currently >=3.8, <3.11). If you need an older version, you can on Ubuntu for example do: