# Installation

If khal is packaged for your OS/distribution, using your system’s standard package manager is probably the easiest way to install khal. khal has been packaged for, among others: Arch Linux (stable and development versions), Debian, Fedora, FreeBSD, Guix, and pkgsrc (or see repology for a more complete list).

If a package isn’t available (or it is outdated) you need to fall back to one of the methods mentioned below.

## Install via Python’s Package Managers

Since khal is written in python, you can use one of the package managers available to install python packages, e.g. pip.

You can install the latest released version of khal by executing:

    pip install khal

or the latest development version by executing:

    pip install git+git://github.com/pimutils/khal.git

This should also take care of installing all required dependencies. If in doubt, do not use sudo pip install but install pip install khal –user. Especially if using the –user flag, khal might be installed to ~/.local/bin. So if your shell cannot find khal, you might want to check there and add that folder to your $PATH.

Otherwise, you can always download the latest release from pypi and execute:

    python setup.py install

or better:

    pip install .

in the unpacked distribution folder.

Since version 0.14.0, khal only supports python 3.10+. If you have python 2 and 3 installed in parallel you might need to use pip3 instead of pip and python3 instead of python. In case your operating system cannot deal with python 2 and 3 packages concurrently, we suggest installing khal in a virtualenv (e.g. by using virtualenvwrapper or with the help of pipsi) and then starting khal from that virtual environment.

## Shell Completion

khal uses click for it’s commpand line interface. click can automatically generate completion files for bash, fish, and zsh which can either be generated and sourced each time your shell is started or, generated once, save to a file and sourced from there. The latter version is much more efficient.

Note

If you package khal, please generate and include the completion file in the package if possible.

### bash

For bash, you can either add the following line to your `.bashrc`:

    eval "$(_KHAL_COMPLETE=bash_source khal)"

Or, save the file somewhere:

    _KHAL_COMPLETE=bash_source khal > ~/.khal-complete.bash

and then source it from your `.bashrc`:

    . ~/.khal-complete.bash

### zsh

For zsh, you can either add the following line to your `.zshrc`:

    eval "$(_KHAL_COMPLETE=zsh_source khal)"

Or, save the file somewhere:

    _KHAL_COMPLETE=zsh_source khal > ~/.khal-complete.zsh

and then source it from your `.zshrc`:

    . ~/.khal-complete.zsh

### fish

For fish, add this to `~/.config/fish/completions/khal.fish`:

    eval (env _KHAL_COMPLETE=fish_source khal)

Or save the script to `~/.config/fish/completions/khal.fish`:

    _KHAL_COMPLETE=fish_source khal > ~/.config/fish/completions/khal.fish

Note, that the latter basically does the same as the former and no efficiency is gained.

## Requirements

khal is written in python and can run on Python 3.10+. It requires a Python with `sqlite3` support enabled (which is usually the case).

If you are installing python via pip or from source, be aware that since khal indirectly depends on lxml you need to either install it via your system’s package manager or have python’s libxml2’s and libxslt1’s headers (included in a separate “development package” on some distributions) installed.

## Packaging

If your packages are generated by running `setup.py install` or some similar mechanism, you’ll end up with very slow entry points (eg: `/usr/bin/khal`). Package managers should use the files included in `bin` as a replacement for those.

The root cause of the issue is really how python’s setuptools generates these and outside of the scope of this project

If your packages are generated using python wheels, this should not be an issue (much like it won’t be an issue for users installing via `pip`).