A criminally short guide to installing polybar on Ubuntu 20.04

polybar is an excellent tool for creating customized, beautiful desktop status bars. It's available for almost all Unixes, some available through package managers, and for the others, you need to compile the source code by your own which sometimes might be painful 😿 .

Introduction

polybar is not available for Focal through apt, so we will go through compiling it in this guide. This guide includes a solution to almost all errors you will likely encounter during the procedure, but if you face a new error, feel free to ask in the comments.

Prerequisite

In this guide, I will be using brew to install some dependencies. If you've not installed it yet, give it a try by following the official procedure.

$ /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

This will install homebrew on your machine in a single easy step.

Instruction

• Clone the repository

$ git clone https://github.com/polybar/polybar.git

• Install dependencies through apt

$ sudo apt-get install cmake cmake-data libcairo2-dev libxcb1-dev libxcb-ewmh-dev libxcb-icccm4-dev libxcb-image0-dev libxcb-randr0-dev libxcb-util0-dev libxcb-xkb-dev pkg-config python3-xcbgen xcb-proto libxcb-xrm-dev i3-wm libasound2-dev libmpdclient-dev libiw-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libpulse-dev python3-sphinx libxcb-composite0-dev libuv1-dev libuv1 libjsoncpp-dev

• Install additional dependencies through brew

$ brew install cairo libuv alsa-lib libmpdclient

• Fix Missing required python module: xcbgen This occurs when you have multiple Python versions installed. You can see the issue on Github.

To fix it, you need to create a symlink between the Python version with the module and the Python version behind python3. You can check this by executing

$ python3 --version
Python 3.9.10

Then create a symlink like this

$ ln -s /usr/lib/python3.10/site-packages/xcbgen /usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/

Note: The exact path here might differ depending on how you install python. For example if you have used brew to install Python, it locates inside /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/lib/ rather than /usr/lib/.

• Building

For building just change the directory to the where polybar is cloned and run build.sh

$ cd polybar && ./build.sh
** Fetching submodules
** A build dir already exists (pass -f to replace)
** Setting build options
** Use GCC even if Clang is installed ----------------------------- [y/N]: Y
** Include support for "internal/i3" (requires i3) ---------------- [y/N]: Y
** Include support for "internal/alsa" (requires alsalib) --------- [y/N]: Y
** Include support for "internal/pulseaudio" (requires libpulse) -- [y/N]: N
** Include support for "internal/network" (requires libnl/libiw) -- [y/N]: Y
** Include support for "internal/mpd" (requires libmpdclient) ----- [y/N]: Y
** Include support for "internal/github" (requires libcurl) ------- [y/N]: Y
** Build "polybar-msg" used to send ipc messages ------------------ [y/N]: Y
** Parallelize the build using make -j16 --------------------------- [y/N]: Y
** Using compiler: clang++/clang

After executing, it asks if you need various components to be supported, e.g., PulseAudio. Be sure to install components you need

When prompted to install the binary answer y to install the library

• Test the installation Execute the following to see if polybar is installed correctly

$ polybar example

Final thoughts

Congratulation! You’ve successfully installed polybar. Take a look at the official wiki for further customization. If you're looking for some motivation, take a look at unixporn, where you can find brilliant ideas to customize your own environments.