You are reading the documentation for the in-development version of Streamlink.

Installation

Windows

Method Installing
Installers See the Windows binaries section below
Portable See the Windows portable version section below
Chocolatey 
choco install streamlink

Installing Chocolatey packages
Windows Package Manager 
winget install streamlink

Installing Winget packages

macOS

Method Installing
Python pip See the PyPI package and source code section below
Homebrew 
brew install streamlink

Installing Homebrew packages

Linux and BSD

Distribution Installing
Arch Linux 
sudo pacman -S streamlink
Arch Linux (aur, git) 
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/streamlink-git.git
cd streamlink-git
makepkg -si

Installing AUR packages
Debian (sid, testing) 
sudo apt update
sudo apt install streamlink
Debian (stable) 
# If you don't have Debian backports already (see link below):
echo "deb http://deb.debian.org/debian buster-backports main" | sudo tee "/etc/apt/sources.list.d/streamlink.list"

sudo apt update
sudo apt install streamlink

Installing Debian backported packages
Fedora 
sudo dnf install streamlink
Gentoo Linux 
sudo emerge net-misc/streamlink
NetBSD (pkgsrc) 
cd /usr/pkgsrc/multimedia/streamlink
sudo make install clean
NixOS 
nix-env -iA nixos.streamlink

NixOS channel
OpenBSD 
doas pkg_add streamlink
Solus 
sudo eopkg install streamlink
Ubuntu 
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
sudo apt update
sudo apt install streamlink
Void 
sudo xbps-install streamlink

Package maintainers

Distribution/Platform Maintainer
Arch Giancarlo Razzolini <grazzolini at archlinux.org>
Arch (aur, git) Josip Ponjavic <josipponjavic at gmail.com>
Chocolatey Scott Walters <me at scowalt.com>
Debian Alexis Murzeau <amubtdx at gmail.com>
Fedora Mohamed El Morabity <melmorabity at fedoraproject.org>
Gentoo soredake <fdsfgs at krutt.org>
NetBSD Maya Rashish <maya at netbsd.org>
NixOS Tuomas Tynkkynen <tuomas.tynkkynen at iki.fi>
OpenBSD Brian Callahan <bcallah at openbsd.org>
Solus Bryan T. Meyers <bmeyers at datadrake.com>
Ubuntu Alin Andrei <andrew at webupd8.org>
Void wkuipers <wietse at kuiprs.nl>
Windows binaries beardypig <beardypig at protonmail.com>
Windows port. version RosadinTV <RosadinTV at outlook.com>
beardypig <beardypig at protonmail.com>

PyPI package and source code

If a package is not available on your platform, or if it's out of date, Streamlink can be installed via pip, the Python package manager.

In addition to using pip, Streamlink can also be installed from source via setuptools after cloning the git repository.

Before running pip, make sure that it's the Python 3 version of pip (to check, run pip --version). On some systems, this isn't the case by default and an alternative, like pip3 for example, needs to be run instead.

Note

On some Linux distributions, the Python headers package needs to be installed before installing Streamlink (python-devel on RedHat, Fedora, etc.).

Ensure that you are using an up-to-date version of pip. At least version 6 is required.

Note

On Linux, when not using a virtual environment, it is recommended to install custom python packages like this only for the current user (see the --user parameter below), since system-wide packages can cause conflicts with the system's regular package manager.

Those user-packages will be installed into ~/.local instead of /usr and entry-scripts for running the programs can be found in ~/.local/bin, eg. ~/.local/bin/streamlink.

In order for the command line shell to be able to find these executables, the user's PATH environment variable needs to be extended. This can be done by adding export PATH="${HOME}/.local/bin:${PATH}" to ~/.profile or ~/.bashrc.

Version Installing
Latest release (pip) 
# Current user
pip install --upgrade --user streamlink

# System wide
sudo pip install --upgrade streamlink
Development version (pip) 
# Current user
pip install --upgrade --user git+https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink.git

# System wide
sudo pip install --upgrade git+https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink.git
Development version (git) 
# Current user
git clone https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink.git
cd streamlink
python setup.py install --user

# System wide
git clone https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink.git
cd streamlink
sudo python setup.py install

Virtual environment

Another method of installing Streamlink in a non-system-wide way is using virtualenv, which creates a user owned Python environment instead.

# Create a new environment
virtualenv ~/myenv

# Activate the environment
source ~/myenv/bin/activate

# Install Streamlink in the environment
pip install --upgrade streamlink

# Use Streamlink in the environment
streamlink ...

# Deactivate the environment
deactivate

# Use Streamlink without activating the environment
~/myenv/bin/streamlink ...

Note

This may also be required on some macOS versions that seem to have weird permission issues.

Dependencies

To install Streamlink from source you will need these dependencies.

Name Notes
Python At least version 3.6.
python-setuptools  
Automatically installed by the setup script
python-requests At least version 2.21.0.
pycryptodome Required to play some encrypted streams
iso-639 Used for localization settings, provides language information
iso3166 Used for localization settings, provides country information
isodate Used for MPEG-DASH streams
PySocks Used for SOCKS Proxies
websocket-client Used for some plugins
Optional
RTMPDump Required to play RTMP streams.
ffmpeg Required to play streams that are made up of separate audio and video streams, eg. YouTube 1080p+

Using pycrypto and pycountry

With these two environment variables it is possible to use pycrypto instead of pycryptodome and pycountry instead of iso-639 and iso3166.

$ export STREAMLINK_USE_PYCRYPTO="true"
$ export STREAMLINK_USE_PYCOUNTRY="true"

Windows binaries

Release Notes
Stable release Download the installer from the GitHub releases page.
Development build For testing purposes only! Built each day at midnight (UTC).
Download the zipped installer from the build artifacts section of one of the recent scheduled builds. Build artifacts are stored by Github for 90 days.
See the commit log for a list of changes since the last stable release.

These installers contain:

  • A compiled version of Streamlink that does not require an existing Python installation
  • RTMPDump for viewing RTMP streams
  • ffmpeg for muxing streams

and perform the following tasks:

  • Add Streamlink to the system's list of installed applications.
    An uninstaller will automatically be created during installation.
  • Add Streamlink's installation directory to the system's PATH environment variable.
    This allows the user to run the streamlink command globally from the command prompt or powershell without specifying its directory.

To build the installer on your own, NSIS and pynsist need to be installed.