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 3.5+
Python development packages
GCC 4.8.1+, Clang 3.3+ or Microsoft Visual C++ 14.21+ and associated development packages
GNU Make
A Verilog or VHDL simulator, depending on your RTL source code
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:
Conda is an open-source package and environment management system that we recommend for Windows.
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 gcc g++ python3 python3-dev python3-pip
In a terminal, run
sudo yum install make gcc gcc-c++ libstdc++-devel python3 python3-devel python3-pip
We recommend using the Homebrew package manager. After installing it, run the following line in a terminal:
brew install python icarus-verilog gtkwave
Installation of cocotb¶
The stable version of cocotb can be installed by running
pip install cocotb
Note
The reusable bus interfaces and testbenching components have recently been moved to the cocotb-bus package.
You can easily install these at the same time as cocotb by adding the bus extra install: pip install cocotb[bus].
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.
This may happen when you use the --user option to pip,
in which case the location is documented here.
For more installation options, please see our Wiki.