Welcome to IPython. Our full documentation is available on our website; if you downloaded a built source distribution the docs/source directory contains the plaintext version of these manuals. If you have Sphinx installed, you can build them by typing cd docs; make html for local browsing.

For full details, see the installation section of the manual. The basic parts of IPython only need the Python standard library, but much of its more advanced functionality requires extra packages.

Officially, IPython requires Python version 2.6, 2.7, or 3.1 and above.

You can run IPython from this directory without even installing it system-wide by typing at the terminal:

$ python ipython.py