Install PyQt5 on macOS

by Martin Fitzpatrick Last updated Apr 23 PyQt5 Installation Guides

This tutorial is also available for PyQt6 , PySide2 , PySide6 and Tkinter

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Before you start the PyQt5 tutorial you will need to have a working installation of PyQt5 on your system. If you don't have either set up yet, the following steps will guide you through how to do this on macOS.

This guide is also available for Linux and Windows.

Note that the following instructions are only for installation of the GPL licensed version of PyQt. If you need to use PyQt in a non-GPL project you will need to purchase an alternative license from Riverbank Computing to release your software.

Install PyQt5 on macOS

If you already have a working installation of Python 3 on macOS, you can go ahead and install PyQt5 as for any other Python package, using the following --

bash

pip3 install pyqt5

If you don't have an installation of Python 3, you will need to install one first. You can download macOS installers for Python 3 from the Python homepage. Once installed, you should be able to use the pip3 install command above to install PyQt5.

Another alternative is to use Homebrew. Homebrew is a package manager for command-line software on macOS. Homebrew has both Python 3 and PyQt5 available in their repositories.

Homebrew -- the missing package manager for macOS

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To install homebrew run the following from the command line --

bash

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

This is also available to copy and paste from the Homebrew homepage.

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Once Homebrew is installed you can then install Python with --

bash

brew install python3

With Python installed, you can then install PyQt5 as normal, using pip3 install pyqt5, or alternatively choose to install it using Homebrew with --

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bash

brew install pyqt5

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Install PyQt5 on macOS was written by Martin Fitzpatrick .

Martin Fitzpatrick has been developing Python/Qt apps for 8 years. Building desktop applications to make data-analysis tools more user-friendly, Python was the obvious choice. Starting with Tk, later moving to wxWidgets and finally adopting PyQt. Martin founded PythonGUIs to provide easy to follow GUI programming tutorials to the Python community. He has written a number of popular Python books on the subject.

Install PyQt5 on macOS was published in installation on May 21, 2019 (updated April 23, 2025) . Feedback & Corrections can be submitted here.

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