Before you start creating applications with PySide6, you need to have a working installation of PySide6 on your system. In this short tutorial, you'll find the steps that will guide you through installing PySide6 on Ubuntu Linux.
This guide is also available for macOS and Windows.
Preparing Ubuntu to Install PySide6
Before installing PySide6, we need to prepare our operating system and install a couple of tools. Python best practices recommend using virtual environments to isolate our Python projects and manage their dependencies.
Unfortunately, the default Ubuntu installation doesn't include tools like the venv module, which allows us to create virtual environments, and the pip command, which lets us install external packages. So, we need to install them from the distro's repositories.
Installing the venv and pip
To install the venv module and the pip command in Ubuntu, we can run the following commands:
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install python3-venv python3-pip
The first command updates the package information from all sources of software we are using in our Ubutu system. The second command downloads and installs the venv module and the pip command. Now, we are ready to create and activate a Python virtual environment.
Creating a Virtual Environment
Once we've installed the venv module, we can proceed to create and activate a Python virtual environment:
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$ mkdir project/ && cd project/
$ python3 -m venv ./venv
$ source venv/bin/activate
(venv) $
First, we create a new working directory named project/ as a root for a hypothetical PySide6 project. Then, we create a new virtual environment with venv and activate it. Note how the prompt indicator changes to signal that we're in an active virtual environment.
Install PySide6 With pip
The quickest way to install PySide6 in a virtual environment is to use pip. Let's run the following command in our active virtual environment:
(venv) $ pip3 install pyside6
This command downloads PySide6 from the Python package index (PyPI) and installs it in our virtual environment.
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Check the Installation
After the PySide6 installation is finished, we can run the python3 command in our virtual environment to start an interactive session and import the library, as shown below. This way, we make sure the installation is working:
>>> import PySide6
Now that you've completed the installation in your Ubuntu Linux system, you can start creating Python GUI applications with PySide6.
