Please report any problems you run into when building the project.

Click here to check if polybar was already packaged for your distro.

• Dependencies
  • Build Dependencies
  • Dependencies
  • Optional Dependencies
• Building
  • Compiling
  • Building with clang
  • BSD
• Uninstalling

Here is a quick rundown of packages polybar needs to build and run correctly. See further below for more details and concrete package names for different distros.

A compiler with C++17 support (clang-7+, gcc-8+), cmake 3.5+, git

• pkg-config
• libuv
• cairo
• libxcb
• python3
• xcb-proto
• xcb-util-image
• xcb-util-wm
• python-sphinx
• python-packaging

Optional dependencies:

• xcb-util-cursor required for the cursor-click and cursor-scroll settings
• xcb-util-xrm required for accessing X resources with ${xrdb:...}

Optional dependencies for extended module support:

• xcb-xkb required by internal/xkeyboard
• alsa-lib required by internal/alsa
• libpulse required by internal/pulseaudio
• i3-wm and jsoncpp required by internal/i3
• libmpdclient required by internal/mpd
• libcurl required by internal/github
• libnl-genl or wireless_tools required by internal/network

The following dependencies are only needed during compilation, you can remove them, if you don't need them, after you built polybar

¹ Only needed when not using the release archives

Note: You only need either gcc or clang.

All above dependencies paste-friendly for dnf (includes both gcc and clang):

sudo dnf install -y gcc-c++ clang git cmake @development-tools python3-sphinx python3-packaging

These are the hard dependencies, you cannot build or run polybar without them:

¹ Before Ubuntu 20.04 (focal) and Debian 11 (bullseye), you need to install the python-xcbgen package because the python3-xcbgen package does not exist for those versions.

All above dependencies paste-friendly for apt:

apt install build-essential git cmake cmake-data pkg-config python3-sphinx python3-packaging libuv1-dev libcairo2-dev libxcb1-dev libxcb-util0-dev libxcb-randr0-dev libxcb-composite0-dev python3-xcbgen xcb-proto libxcb-image0-dev libxcb-ewmh-dev libxcb-icccm4-dev

All above dependencies paste-friendly for dnf:

sudo dnf install -y cairo-devel libuv-devel xcb-util-devel libxcb-devel xcb-proto xcb-util-image-devel xcb-util-wm-devel

These dependencies enable optional features in polybar, if they are installed during compilation:

¹ You only need to install either libnl-genl or wireless-tools. If libnl-genl is installed it will be preferred over wireless-tools even if both are installed.

All above dependencies paste-friendly for apt:

apt install libxcb-xkb-dev libxcb-xrm-dev libxcb-cursor-dev libasound2-dev libpulse-dev i3-wm libjsoncpp-dev libmpdclient-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libnl-genl-3-dev

All above dependencies paste-friendly for dnf:

sudo dnf install -y xcb-util-xrm-devel xcb-util-cursor-devel alsa-lib-devel pulseaudio-libs-devel i3-devel jsoncpp-devel libmpdclient-devel libcurl-devel libnl3-devel

Note: If you have enabled any optional feature during installation, the dependencies for that feature need to remain installed, otherwise polybar may not start.

When building polybar from source, you can either download the polybar source code from a release archive or directly from the git repository.

Release Archive

Download the release archive polybar-<version>.tar.gz over at our release page and extract it with tar xvzf polybar-<version>.tar. Now change into the extracted folder (generally cd polybar-<version>)

Repository

To get the sources directly from the repository, run the following commands:

Warning: Compiling polybar this way will give you the latest unreleased changes, there may be bugs and it may break your config.

# Make sure to type the `git' command as-is to clone all git submodules too
git clone --recursive https://github.com/polybar/polybar
cd polybar

Regardless of how you downloaded the sources, you should now be inside the folder where the polybar sources are located.

To compile, run the following commands:

Note: If you are using anaconda, run conda deactivate before running cmake, also see the note on the Known Issues page if that doesn't work.

Note: Similarly, if you are using pyenv, you will likely need to use system python during compilation. You can revert to system python in the current directory by executing pyenv local system directly before executing cmake.

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make -j$(nproc)
# Optional. This will install the polybar executable in /usr/bin
sudo make install

In some circumstances the compilation might fail when using gcc and you will have to use clang to compile polybar.

To do that, in the cmake .. step above, run the following command instead:

cmake -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER="clang++" ..

Polybar was built with linux in mind and does not officially support the BSDs. That being said, there are a few lines of code to make polybar at least build on FreeBSD. So it should be possible to build polybar on FreeBSD using the same process as on linux (though you may need to pass the -DCMAKE_EXE_LINKER_FLAGS="-L/usr/local/lib" flag to cmake).

There are ports available for OpenBSD and FreeBSD, we suggest you use these for installing polybar.

If you have installed polybar using a package manager, the package manager will provide the uninstall feature.

If you have manually compiled and installed polybar, go into the build folder where you originally ran make install. There you can run sudo make uninstall to remove all installed files from your system.

Warning: make uninstall will try to delete all files listed in the install_manifest.txt file inside your build folder. Make sure you first check that it won't delete any important files.

New in version 3.6.0

Polybar provides a bunch of cmake options to configure which and how components are compiled.