pycsdl2

pycsdl2 is a low-overhead, compiled SDL2 binding for CPython. It aims to provide the familiar C API of SDL2, while offering several Pythonic features such as automatic memory management, bounds checking and exceptions.

Documentation

Documentation is hosted online at https://pycsdl2.readthedocs.org/.

The Python API is documented with Sphinx in the docs/ directory. If you have GNU Make and Sphinx installed, run the following in the docs/ directory to generate the HTML documentation in docs/_build/html/:

make html

On Windows, make.bat can be used instead of GNU Make. Run the following in the docs/ directory to generate the HTML documentation in docs/_build/html/:

.\make.bat html

The documentation can be generated in other formats as well. See the output of make help or .\make.bat help for more details.

Building

Building the source code requires the CPython header files to be installed. This may require the installation of a development package such as python3-dev in Debian. The headers are installed by default in the official Python distributions for Windows and Mac OS X.

On Windows and Mac OS X, pycsdl2 will be statically linked against the bundled SDL2 source code. As such,

• on Windows, the Windows 7 SDK and the Standalone DirectX SDK must be installed.
• on Mac OS X, XCode must be installed.

On other platforms such as Linux, the system must have a C compiler installed and the SDL2 library and header files installed. This may require the installation of a development package such as libsdl2-dev on Debian. Furthermore, a working installation of sdl2-config or pkg-config must be present in the executable search paths. pycsdl2 will be dynamically linked to the SDL2 library on these platforms.

Once your system satisfies the above requirements, run the following in the root of the source directory:

python3 setup.py build

If the build is successful, pycsdl2 can be installed with:

python3 setup.py install

The above build behavior can be controlled with the environment variable PYCSDL2_LIB:

• setting it to auto will use the default behavior. setup.py will build and link against the bundled SDL2 source code on Windows and Mac OS X, and link against the system SDL2 library on other platforms.
• setting it to bundled will force setup.py to build and link against the bundled SDL2 source code.
• setting it to system will force setup.py to link against the system's SDL2 library. sdl2-config will be used to retrieve the required compile and link flags, and if it fails, pkg-config will be used instead.
• setting it to sdl2-config or pkg-config will force setup.py to link against the system's SDL2 library, and to only use sdl2-config or pkg-config respectively to retrieve the required compile and link flags.

Unit tests

Unit tests are implemented using the unittest standard library module. Once the pycsdl2 has been built with python3 setup.py build, you can run all tests by running the following in the root of the source directory:

python3 -mtest

You can also run an individual test suite by running the corresponding file in the test/ directory:

python3 test/testfoo.py

Understanding the source code

The source code is documented with Doxygen. If you have a working installation, simply run the following in the root of the source directory:

doxygen

The HTML documentation will be written to the apidocs/html directory.

License

Unless otherwise stated, pycsdl2 source code is licensed under the zlib license.

pycsdl2 source code contains an unmodified copy of the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) version 2.0.0 source code. The source code is licensed under the zlib license.