PyOpenGL Documentation

PyOpenGL uses two main types of wrappers:

1. Autogenerated Wrappers: These reside in the OpenGL/raw hierarchy and are derived directly from Khronos XML. They provide the base bindings.
2. Secondary/API Wrappers: Located in OpenGL/$API hierarchies (e.g., OpenGL.GL), these are wrapper functions that implement logic for connections between arguments (e.g., ensuring a specific flag requires a specific parameter size). These modules often consist of autogenerated code supplemented by manually maintained bits to handle complex specifications that autogeneration cannot capture.

The easiest way to run the test suite from a source-code checkout is using the uv runner with tox:

$ uv run --with tox,tox-uv tox

Prerequisites

To run the tests, you need:

• git
• GLUT (FreeGLUT)
• GLExtrusion library (libgle)
• GLU
• uv

Test Suite Behavior

• Windows/Display: The test suite opens many windows. On a desktop, this can make the machine difficult to interact with.
• Parallelism: You can use tox -p for parallel runs, but be cautious as this can crash your desktop due to the number of windows being opened.
• Wayland: The glfw window may not proceed if your Wayland session is locked.

To produce the PyOpenGL documentation set, you must have PyOpenGL already installed on your system. This process involves running a sequence of scripts that collect original documentation, samples, and references, and then generate HTML files. The output will be placed in a directory named manual-X.Y (where X.Y is the version number).

./acquireoriginal.py
./samples.py
./references.py 
./generate.py 

If you are new to PyOpenGL, it is recommended to start with the OpenGLContext tutorials. These tutorials require the OpenGLContext package, which provides a high-level wrapper including a scenegraph engine and VRML97 parser.

You can install it via pip:

$ pip install "OpenGLContext-full==3.1.1"

Alternatively, you can clone the openglcontext repository directly to access the tutorial sources.

You can install the packages via PyPI using pip:

$ pip install PyOpenGL PyOpenGL_accelerate

If you want to install from a local repository clone, run the following commands from the root of the repository:

$ cd pyopengl
$ pip install -e .
$ cd accelerate
$ pip install -e .

Note: Compiling PyOpenGL_accelerate requires a functioning Python extension-compiling environment.

To update the PyOpenGL modules with the latest definitions from the Khronos registry, run the xml_generate.py script from the src directory. This script will clone or update the local Khronos registry checkout and parse the XML files to regenerate the OpenGL/raw hierarchy.

cd src
./xml_generate.py

PyOpenGL-accelerate provides C (Cython) extensions that accelerate common operations in PyOpenGL 3.x. While it is not a strict requirement for using PyOpenGL, performance will be poor without it.

Binary builds for most major platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac) are typically available via GitHub CI. If you need to build from source, you can do so from the PyOpenGL repository using pip install ..