Installation

This document describes the prerequisites and the installation of Autobahn.

Requirements

Autobahn runs on Python on top of these networking frameworks:

Autobahn requires Python 3.11 or later. You will need at least one of the networking frameworks above.

Note

Most of Autobahn’s WebSocket and WAMP features are available on both Twisted and asyncio, so you are free to choose the underlying networking framework based on your own criteria.

For Twisted installation, please see here. Asyncio is included in the Python standard library for all supported Python versions.

Supported Configurations

Here are the configurations supported by Autobahn:

Python

Twisted

asyncio

Notes

CPython 3.11, 3.12, 3.13, and 3.14

yes

yes

Pre-built wheels are published for supported platforms.

PyPy 3.11

yes

yes

Pre-built wheels are published for supported platforms.

Performance Note

Autobahn is portable, well tuned code. For best performance, use the pre-built wheels published on PyPI when one is available for your Python version and platform. Platform-specific wheels may include native CFFI and NVX acceleration; the source distribution remains available for unsupported wheel combinations. See Wheels Inventory for the full wheel matrix.

To give you an idea of the performance you can expect, here is a blog post benchmarking Autobahn running on the RaspberryPi (a tiny embedded computer) under PyPy.

Installing Autobahn

Using Docker

We offer Docker Images with Autobahn pre-installed. To use this, if you have Docker already installed, just do

sudo docker run -it crossbario/autobahn-python python client.py --url ws://IP _of_WAMP_router:8080/ws --realm realm1

This starts up a Docker container and client.py, which connects to a Crossbar.io router at the given URL and to the given realm.

There are several docker images to choose from, depending on whether you are using CPython or PyPy.

There are the flavors which are based on the official CPython and PyPy images, plus versions using Alpine Linux, which have a smaller footprint. (Note: Footprint only matters for the download once per machine, after that the cached image is used. Containers off the same image/layers only take up space corresponding to how different from the image they are, so image size is relatively less important when using multiple containers.)

Install from PyPI

To install Autobahn from the Python Package Index using Pip:

python -m pip install --upgrade pip
python -m pip install autobahn

This is the recommended installation method. Pip will select a pre-built wheel when one matches your Python implementation, Python version, operating system, and CPU architecture. Current releases publish wheels for CPython 3.11 through 3.14 and PyPy 3.11 across the supported Linux, macOS, and Windows targets documented in Wheels Inventory.

You can also specify install variants (see below). E.g. to install Twisted automatically as a dependency

python -m pip install "autobahn[twisted]"

No extra is needed for asyncio because it is included in the Python standard library.

Install from Sources

To install from sources, clone the repository:

git clone git@github.com:crossbario/autobahn-python.git

checkout a tagged release:

cd autobahn-python
git checkout v25.12.2

Warning

You should only use tagged releases, not master. The latest code from master might be broken, unfinished and untested. So you have been warned ;)

Then install the checkout:

python -m pip install -e ".[twisted]"

Install Variants

Autobahn has the following install variants:

Variant

Description

twisted

Install Twisted as a dependency.

asyncio

Backwards-compatible no-op; asyncio is in the Python standard library.

accelerate

Backwards-compatible no-op; native acceleration is provided by Autobahn wheels where supported.

compress

Install packages for non-standard WebSocket compression methods.

encryption

Install TLS and WAMP encryption/authentication packages.

scram

Install WAMP-SCRAM authentication packages.

serialization

Install bjdata to enable the optional UBJSON WAMP serializer. CPython-only - it cannot install on PyPy (upstream NeuroJSON/pybj#6); on CPython without a compiler set PYBJDATA_NO_EXTENSION=1 for a pure-Python build. JSON, MessagePack, CBOR and FlatBuffers are always available without this extra (use them on PyPy).

nvx

Backwards-compatible no-op; NVX acceleration is included in binary wheels where supported.

all

Install all optional feature dependencies.

Install variants can be combined, e.g. to install Autobahn with all optional packages for use with Twisted on CPython:

python -m pip install "autobahn[twisted,compress,encryption,scram]"

Windows Installation

For convenience, here are minimal instructions to install both Python and Autobahn/Twisted on Windows:

  1. Go to the Python web site and install a supported 64-bit Python 3.11 or later release.

  2. Ensure Python and Scripts are available on your PATH.

  3. Download the Pip install script and double click it (or run python get-pip.py from a command shell)

  4. Open a command shell and run python -m pip install "autobahn[twisted]".

Check the Installation

To check the installation, fire up the Python and run

>>> from autobahn import __version__
>>> print(__version__)
25.12.2

Depending on Autobahn

To require Autobahn as a dependency of your package, include the following in your setup.py script

install_requires = ["autobahn>=25.12.2"]

You can also depend on an install variant which automatically installs dependent packages

install_requires = ["autobahn[twisted]>=25.12.2"]

The latter will automatically install Twisted as a dependency.

Where to go

Now you’ve got Autobahn installed, depending on your needs, head over to