Quick installation for CPython (cffi is distributed with PyPy):
pip install cffi
In more details:
This code has been developed on Linux, but should work on any POSIX platform as well as on Windows 32 and 64. (It relies occasionally on libffi, so it depends on libffi being bug-free; this may not be fully the case on some of the more exotic platforms.)
CFFI supports CPython 2.7, 3.x (tested with 3.6 to 3.9); and is distributed with PyPy (CFFI 1.0 is distributed with and requires PyPy 2.6).
The core speed of CFFI is better than ctypes, with import times being either lower if you use the post-1.0 features, or much higher if you don’t. The wrapper Python code you typically need to write around the raw CFFI interface slows things down on CPython, but not unreasonably so. On PyPy, this wrapper code has a minimal impact thanks to the JIT compiler. This makes CFFI the recommended way to interface with C libraries on PyPy.
Requirements:
python-dev
. Refer to the appropriate docs for your OS.
libffi-dev
in order to compile CFFI itself.
pip install cffi
).
Download and Installation:
Checksums of the “source” package version 1.15.1:
Or grab the most current version from the
Heptapod page
:
hg clone https://foss.heptapod.net/pypy/cffi
python setup.py install
or
python setup_base.py install
(should work out of the box on Linux or Windows; see below for
MacOS X
)。
running the tests:
py.test c/ testing/
(if you didn’t install cffi yet, you need first
python setup_base.py build_ext -f
-i
)
Demos:
cffi
.
libffi
is notoriously messy to install and use — to the point that CPython includes its own copy to avoid relying on external packages. CFFI does the same for Windows, but not for other platforms (which should have their own working libffi’s). Modern Linuxes work out of the box thanks to
pkg-config
. Here are some (user-supplied) instructions for other platforms.
Homebrew (Thanks David Griffin for this)
brew install pkg-config libffi PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/opt/libffi/lib/pkgconfig pip install cffi
Alternatively, on OS/X 10.6 (Thanks Juraj Sukop for this)
For building libffi you can use the default install path, but then, in
setup.py
you need to change:
include_dirs = []
to:
include_dirs = ['/usr/local/lib/libffi-3.0.11/include']
Then running
python setup.py build
complains about “fatal error: error writing to -: Broken pipe”, which can be fixed by running:
ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386 -arch x86_64" python setup.py build
as described here .
Win32 and Win64 work and are tested at least each official release.
The recommended C compiler compatible with Python 2.7 is this one:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=44266
There is a known problem with distutils on Python 2.7, as explained in
https://bugs.python.org/issue23246
, and the same problem applies whenever you want to run compile() to build a dll with this specific compiler suite download.
import setuptools
might help, but YMMV
For Python 3.4 and beyond: https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/downloads/visual-studio-2015-ctp-vs
This is about getting an ImportError about
_cffi_backend.so
with a message like
Symbol not found: _PyUnicodeUCS2_AsASCIIString
. This error occurs in Python 2 as soon as you mix “ucs2” and “ucs4” builds of Python. It means that you are now running a Python compiled with “ucs4”, but the extension module
_cffi_backend.so
was compiled by a different Python: one that was running “ucs2”. (If the opposite problem occurs, you get an error about
_PyUnicodeUCS4_AsASCIIString
instead.)
If you are using
pyenv
, then see
https://github.com/yyuu/pyenv/issues/257
.
More generally, the solution that should always work is to download the sources of CFFI (instead of a prebuilt binary) and make sure that you build it with the same version of Python than the one that will use it. For example, with virtualenv:
virtualenv ~/venv
cd ~/path/to/sources/of/cffi
~/venv/bin/python setup.py build --force
# forcing a rebuild to
make sure
~/venv/bin/python setup.py install
This will compile and install CFFI in this virtualenv, using the Python from this virtualenv.
You need to make sure you have an up-to-date version of libffi, which fixes some bugs.