Installation

Last Reviewed:2016-07-23

Installation with PIP

Installation should be rather straight-forward. python-escpos is on PyPi, so you can simply enter:

pip install python-escpos

This should install all necessary dependencies. Apart from that python-escpos should also be available as a Debian package. If you want to always benefit from the newest stable releases you should probably install from PyPi.

Setup udev for USB-Printers

  1. Get the Product ID and Vendor ID from the lsusb command # lsusb  Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1a2b:1a2b Device name
  2. Create a udev rule to let users belonging to dialout group use the printer. You can create the file /etc/udev/rules.d/99-escpos.rules and add the following: SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="1a2b", ATTRS{idProduct}=="1a2b", MODE="0664", GROUP="dialout" Replace idVendor and idProduct hex numbers with the ones that you got from the previous step. Note that you can either, add yourself to “dialout” group, or use another group you already belongs instead “dialout” and set it in the GROUP parameter in the above rule.
  3. Restart udev # sudo service udev restart In some new systems it is done with # sudo udevadm control --reload

Enabling tab-completion in CLI

python-escpos has a CLI with tab-completion. This is realised with argcomplete. In order for this to work you have to enable tab-completion, which is described in the manual of argcomplete.

If you only want to enable it for python-escpos, or global activation does not work, try this:

eval "$(register-python-argcomplete python-escpos)"