Installation

Using cocotb requires installation of prerequisites and installation of cocotb itself. In this document, we are assuming that you already have a supported simulator available in PATH.

Installation of Prerequisites

The current stable version of cocotb requires:

Python 3.6+
GNU Make 3+
A Verilog or VHDL simulator, depending on your RTL source code

Changed in version 1.7.0: Dropped requirement of Python development headers and C++ compiler for release versions.

Changed in version 1.6.0: Dropped Python 3.5 support

Changed in version 1.4: Dropped Python 2 support

Note

In order to use a 32-bit simulator you need to use a 32-bit version of Python.

The installation instructions vary depending on your operating system:

We recommend users who are running Windows and who are more comfortable with a Unix shell, or who have legacy Makefile-based projects, to use Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). After installing WSL and a supported Linux distribution, follow the Linux installation instructions for cocotb.

Conda is an open-source package and environment management system that we recommend for users who are more comfortable with native Windows development. Download and install Miniconda from https://conda.io/. From an Anaconda Prompt, use the following line to install a compiler (GCC or Clang) and GNU Make:

conda install -c msys2 m2-base m2-make

In a terminal, run

sudo apt-get install make python3 python3-pip libpython3-dev

In a terminal, run

sudo yum install make python3 python3-pip python3-libs

We recommend using the Homebrew package manager. After installing it, run the following line in a terminal:

brew install python

Installation of cocotb

The latest stable version of cocotb can be installed by running

pip install cocotb

Note

If your user does not have permissions to install cocotb using the instructions above, try adding the --user option to pip (see the pip documentation).

Warning

pip may belong to a different Python installation to what you expect. Use pip -V to check. If this prints “(python 2.7)”, use pip3 or python3 -m pip in place of pip in the command shown.

If you want to install the development version of cocotb, instructions are here.

After installation, you should be able to execute cocotb-config. If it is not found, you need to append its location to the PATH environment variable.

For more installation options, please see our Wiki.