Installing the library

There are several ways to get the pybind11 source, which lives at pybind/pybind11 on GitHub. The pybind11 developers recommend one of the first three ways listed here, submodule, PyPI, or conda-forge, for obtaining pybind11.

Include as a submodule

When you are working on a project in Git, you can use the pybind11 repository as a submodule. From your git repository, use:

git submodule add -b stable ../../pybind/pybind11 extern/pybind11
git submodule update --init

This assumes you are placing your dependencies in extern/, and that you are using GitHub; if you are not using GitHub, use the full https or ssh URL instead of the relative URL ../../pybind/pybind11 above. Some other servers also require the .git extension (GitHub does not).

From here, you can now include extern/pybind11/include, or you can use the various integration tools (see Build systems) pybind11 provides directly from the local folder.

Include with PyPI

You can download the sources and CMake files as a Python package from PyPI using Pip. Just use:

pip install pybind11

This will provide pybind11 in a standard Python package format. If you want pybind11 available directly in your environment root, you can use:

pip install "pybind11[global]"

This is not recommended if you are installing with your system Python, as it will add files to /usr/local/include/pybind11 and /usr/local/share/cmake/pybind11, so unless that is what you want, it is recommended only for use in virtual environments or your pyproject.toml file (see Build systems).

Include with conda-forge

You can use pybind11 with conda packaging via conda-forge:

conda install -c conda-forge pybind11

Include with vcpkg

You can download and install pybind11 using the Microsoft vcpkg dependency manager:

git clone https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg.git
cd vcpkg
./bootstrap-vcpkg.sh
./vcpkg integrate install
vcpkg install pybind11

The pybind11 port in vcpkg is kept up to date by Microsoft team members and community contributors. If the version is out of date, please create an issue or pull request on the vcpkg repository.

Global install with brew

The brew package manager (Homebrew on macOS, or Linuxbrew on Linux) has a pybind11 package. To install:

brew install pybind11

Other options

Other locations you can find pybind11 are listed here; these are maintained by various packagers and the community.