Building

Building MyPaint from source gives testers and developers the most bleeding edge feature set MyPaint has to offer. For most use cases, the end user will not need this guide: MyPaint is packaged in Flathub, as an AppImage, and in many popular distributions.

First Party Dependencies

These dependencies are developed by the MyPaint project.

User Installation

You don’t need to install first party dependencies in user directories (i.e. not system-wide) in order to install MyPaint as a user, but if you want to, use the following pattern:

./configure --prefix=$BASE_DIR && make install

Third Party Dependencies

MyPaint depends on the following software:

• python (>= 2.7.4)
• gtk3 (>= 3.12)
• pygobject
• setuptools
• swig (>= 3)
• numpy
• librsvg2 (and its svg gdk-pixbuf loader)
• pycairo (>= 1.4)
• lcms

Debian-based

sudo apt-get install -y \
git swig gettext g++ gir1.2-gtk-3.0 libgtk-3-dev libpng-dev liblcms2-dev \
libjson-c-dev python-gi-dev librsvg2-common

sudo apt-get install -y \
python3-setuptools python3-dev python3-numpy python3-gi-cairo

If this doesn’t work, try older names for the development packages, such as libjson0-dev, or libpng12-dev.

Red Hat-based

# yum install -y git swig gettext gcc-c++ libpng-devel lcms2-devel json-c-devel \
gtk3 gtk3-devel gobject-introspection pygobject3-devel \
librsvg2

# yum install -y python3-setuptools python3-devel python3-numpy

SUSE-based

# zypper install \
git swig gcc-c++ gobject-introspection gtk3-devel libpng16-devel liblcms2-devel \
libjson-c-devel librsvg-2-2 gettext-tools

# zypper install \
python311-setuptools python311-devel python311-numpy-devel python311-pycairo \
python311-gobject-devel

MSYS2 (Windows)

For 32-bit targets, replace x86_64 with i686.

pacman -S --noconfirm --needed \
git mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain mingw-w64-x86_64-pkg-config \
mingw-w64-x86_64-python2-numpy mingw-w64-x86_64-gtk3 \
mingw-w64-x86_64-pygobject-devel mingw-w64-x86_64-lcms2 mingw-w64-x86_64-json-c \
mingw-w64-x86_64-librsvg mingw-w64-x86_64-hicolor-icon-theme \
mingw-w64-x86_64-python2-cairo mingw-w64-x86_64-python2-gobject \
mingw-w64-x86_64-mypaint-brushes2

MacPorts (macOS)

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.11/lib/pkgconfig/
export CFLAGS="-I/opt/local/include"

sudo port install gtk3
sudo port install json-c
sudo port install lcms2
sudo port install hicolor-icon-theme
sudo port install librsvg

sudo port install py311-numpy
sudo port install py311-scipy
sudo port install py311-pyobjc-cocoa # optional, for i18n support
sudo port install py311-gobject3

Build MyPaint

MyPaint is a Python project, and contains a setup.py script in the repo’s root directory. However, this isn’t a typical Python module, so pip install doesn’t work.

python setup.py --help-commands   # list all commands
python setup.py --help build   # get options for "build"

Demo Mode

Run MyPaint without leaving behind build artefacts. Settings aren’t saved between runs.

python setup.py demo

Managed Install/Uninstall

MyPaint has an additional custom install command, for people used to our old SCons recipes. It isn’t compatible with SCons installs, but it allows you to do an uninstall later.

# For most Linux types
sudo python setup.py managed_install
sudo python setup.py managed_install --prefix=/usr

# You may need to make data files world-readable if you use "sudo"
sudo find /usr/local -ipath '*mypaint*' -exec chmod -c a+rX {} \;

# You can uninstall at any later time
sudo python setup.py managed_uninstall
sudo python setup.py managed_uninstall --prefix=/usr

Note that uninstallation doesn’t get rid of all the folders that the managed install created.

Changing Install Directory

The default install location is /usr/local. To change this, use the --prefix option:

python setup.py managed_install --prefix="/PATH/TO/DIR/"

pkgconfig

If setup.py can’t locate your pkgconfig path, use the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable, e.g.

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/PATH/TO/lib/pkgconfig/:/PATH/TO/LIB/share/pkgconfig/

• The two colon-separated paths refer to the locations of package configuration files for libmypaint and mypaint-brushes respectively.

In addition to knowing where libmypaint is installed when building, MyPaint also needs to know its location when running:

• Run the build_ext command with the --set-rpath flag prior to installation.
  • Remember to use the same prefix if uninstalling via managed_uninstall
• (Not recommended) Use the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment.

python setup.py build_ext --set-rpath managed_install --prefix=$BASE_DIR

#If you want to build an older version of MyPaint that did not have this
#option, you can instead use the built-in `--rpath=` option to `build_ext`,
#setting the dependency path(s) manually.

python setup.py build_ext --rpath=$BASE_DIR/lib/

If you have already run the build script without --set-rpath, you can run the following to force a rebuild:

python setup.py build_ext --set-rpath --force

Custom installation directory layout

The directory layout of MyPaint installations is specified in setup.cfg (TOML), in the [install] table.

In those paths, $base is a placeholder that is replaced by the value set with --prefix in the install command (/usr by default).

The installation directories can be overridden for each type by providing a flag to the install command equivalent to the name of one of the install-xyz variables in setup.cfg. For example:

python setup.py install --prefix=/usr/local --install-purelib='$base/lib64/mypaint'

Run MyPaint

The start script mypaint will be placed in $BASE_DIR/bin/, so either add that path to your PATH environment variable:

export PATH=$BASE_DIR/bin/:$PATH
mypaint

or create links to the script:

ln -s $BASE_DIR/bin/mypaint my-local-mypaint
./my-local-mypaint