Installation

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. 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 or above (also python-dev, libssl-dev and libffi-dev is required on Ubuntu) sudo apt-get install python-dev libssl-dev libffi-dev
  • ImageMagick (brew install imagemagick can get you this on OS X and sudo apt-get install imagemagick on Ubuntu the imagemagick package needs to be installed. On Windows do chocoinstall imagemagick, which requires chocolatey, or download from here).

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 .

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