Toga

Toga is a Python native, OS native, cross platform GUI toolkit.

Quickstart

In your virtualenv, install Toga, and then run it:

$ pip install toga-demo
$ toga-demo

This will pop up a GUI window showing the full range of widgets available to an application using Toga.

Prerequisites

Toga has some minimum requirements:

  • If you’re on OS X, you need to be on 10.7 (Lion) or newer.
  • If you’re on Linux, you need to have GTK+ 3.4 or later. This is the version that ships with Ubuntu 12.04; you’ll need to have the python-gi (or python3-gi if you’re using Python 3) package installed. If you want to use the WebView widget, you’ll also need to have WebKit, plus the GI bindings to WebKit (gir1.2-webkit-3.0) installed.

If these requirements aren’t met, Toga either won’t work at all, or won’t have full functionality.

Problems with source installs

Internally, Toga is comprised of a number of subpackages - one for each platform it supports. If you install using wheels, the install process will correctly identify the required packages and install them. However, if you install from source using pip, there is a known bug in pip that causes dependencies to not be installed. It may be necessary to manually install the following pre-requisites:

  • OS X: pip install toga-cocoa
  • Linux: pip install toga-gtk toga-cassowary cassowary
  • Win32: pip install toga-win32 toga-cassowary cassowary

Problems using virtualenv under Linux

When on Linux, Toga uses the system native python GTK+3 bindings for display purposes. However, if you’re using a --no-site-packages virtualenv, the Python bindings for GTK won’t be in your PYTHONPATH.

Unfortunately, you can’t pip install GTK+ bindings, so you have to use a workaround. To make the system GTK+ bindings available to your virtualenv, symlink the gi module from the system dist-packages directory into your virtualenv’s site-packages:

$ cd $VIRTUAL_ENV/lib/python2.7/site-packages
$ ln -si /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gi

Community

Toga is part of the BeeWare suite. You can talk to the community through: