Installation

How to install Cowser on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Requirements

Python 3.8 or newer (3.12 recommended).
pip — bundled with Python on most systems.

From PyPI

pip install cowser

This installs the cowser command and the library. There are no hard runtime dependencies on Python 3.11+; on Python 3.8–3.10 the tomli package is pulled in automatically to read the TOML config file.

Extra features

Extra	Installs	Enables
`color`	`colorama`	ANSI colors on legacy Windows consoles (pre-Windows 10 cmd.exe)
`binary`	`pyinstaller`	Building single-file binaries
`docs`	`mkdocs`, `mkdocstrings`	Running the docs site locally
`dev`	`pytest`, `build`, `mypy`	Development and testing

pip install "cowser[color]"      # colors on old Windows consoles
pip install "cowser[dev]"        # for development

From source

git clone https://github.com/rkriad585/Cowser
cd Cowser
pip install .

For an editable (development) install:

pip install -e ".[dev]"

Windows wrappers

On Windows, the repository ships cowser.cmd and cowser.ps1, which invoke the installed package via python -m cowser. If python is on your PATH, you can run them without installing anything extra:

cowser.cmd Alice

.\cowser.ps1 --think --cow owl "Where am I?"

Single-file binaries

Standalone binaries that need no Python at all:

pip install -e ".[binary]"
python scripts/build_binary.py

The binary lands in dist/ (cowser.exe on Windows). See deployment.md for details.

Docker

docker build -t cowser .
docker run --rm cowser --cow owl "Hello from a container"

The image runs as a non-root user. See deployment.md.

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