This package contains Python bindings for ØMQ. ØMQ is a lightweight and fast messaging implementation.

PyZMQ should work with any Python ≥ 2.6 (including Python 3), as well as PyPy. The Cython backend used by CPython supports libzmq ≥ 2.1.4 (including 3.2.x and 4.x), but the CFFI backend used by PyPy only supports libzmq ≥ 3.2.2 (including 4.x).

For a summary of changes to pyzmq, see our changelog.

PyZMQ ≥ 2.2.0 fully supports the 3.x and 4.x APIs of libzmq, developed at zeromq/libzmq. No code to change, no flags to pass, just build pyzmq against the latest and it should work.

PyZMQ does not support the old libzmq 2 API on PyPy.

See PyZMQ's Sphinx-generated documentation on GitHub for API details, and some notes on Python and Cython development. If you want to learn about using ØMQ in general, the excellent ØMQ Guide is the place to start, which has a Python version of every example. We also have some information on our wiki.

Unless you specifically want to develop PyZMQ, we recommend downloading the PyZMQ source code or wheels from PyPI. On Windows, you can get .exe installers from Christoph Gohlke.

You can also get the latest source code from our GitHub repository, but building from the repository will require that you install Cython version 0.16 or later.

For more detail on building pyzmq, see our Wiki.

We build wheels for OS X and Windows, so you can get a binary on those platforms with:

pip install pyzmq

but compiling from source with pip install pyzmq should work in most environments. Especially on OS X, make sure you are using the latest pip (≥ 6), or it may not find the right wheels.

If the wheel doesn't work for some reason, or you want to force pyzmq to be compiled (this is often preferable if you already have libzmq installed and configured the way you want it), you can force installation with:

pip install --no-use-wheel pyzmq

When compiling pyzmq (e.g. installing with pip on Linux), it is generally recommended that zeromq be installed separately, via homebrew, apt, yum, etc:

# Debian-based
sudo apt-get install libzmq3-dev

# RHEL-based
sudo yum install libzmq3-devel

If this is not available, pyzmq will try to build libzmq as a Python Extension, though this is not guaranteed to work.

Building pyzmq from the git repo (including release tags on GitHub) requires Cython.

For libzmq 2.0.x, use pyzmq release 2.0.10.1.

pyzmq-2.1.11 was the last version of pyzmq to support Python 2.5, and pyzmq ≥ 2.2.0 requires Python ≥ 2.6. pyzmq-13.0.0 introduces PyPy support via CFFI, which only supports libzmq-3.2.2 and newer.

PyZMQ releases ≤ 2.2.0 matched libzmq versioning, but this is no longer the case, starting with PyZMQ 13.0.0 (it was the thirteenth release, so why not?). PyZMQ ≥ 13.0 follows semantic versioning conventions accounting only for PyZMQ itself.