Known Problems

For any unanswered questions or problems, see Support and Contact.

Manual installation

If your distribution doesn’t provide a package for vdirsyncer, you still can use Python’s package manager “pip”. First, you’ll have to check that the following things are installed:

  • A compatible version of Python (2.7+ or 3.3+) and the corresponding pip package
  • libxml and libxslt
  • zlib

On Linux systems, using the distro’s package manager is the best way to do this, for example, using Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install libxml2 libxslt1.1 zlib1g python

Then you have several options:

The dirty, easy way

The easiest way to install vdirsyncer at this point would be to run:

pip install --user vdirsyncer

This method has a major flaw though: Pip doesn’t keep track of the files it installs. Vdirsyncer’s files would be located somewhere in ~/.local/lib/python*, but you can’t possibly know which packages were installed as dependencies of vdirsyncer and which ones were not, should you decide to uninstall it. In other words, using pip that way would pollute your home directory.

The clean but hard way

There is a way to install Python software without scattering stuff across your filesystem: virtualenv. There are a lot of resources on how to use it, the simplest possible way would look something like:

virtualenv ~/vdirsyncer_env
~/vdirsyncer_env/bin/pip install vdirsyncer
alias vdirsyncer="~/vdirsyncer_env/bin/vdirsyncer

You’ll have to put the last line into your .bashrc or .bash_profile.

This method has two advantages:

  • It separately installs all Python packages into ~/vdirsyncer_env/, without relying on the system packages. This works around OS- or distro-specific issues.
  • You can delete ~/vdirsyncer_env/ to uninstall vdirsyncer entirely.

The new, perfect way

pipsi is a new package manager for Python-based software that automatically sets up a virtualenv for each program you install. Assuming you have it installed on your operating system, you can do:

pipsi install --python python3 vdirsyncer

and .local/bin/vdirsyncer will be your new vdirsyncer installation. To update vdirsyncer to the latest version:

pipsi upgrade vdirsyncer

If you’re done with vdirsyncer, you can do:

pipsi uninstall vdirsyncer

and vdirsyncer will be uninstalled, including its dependencies.