Welcome to Kivy

Welcome to Kivy’s documentation. Kivy is an open source software library for rapid development of applications equipped with novel user interfaces, such as multi-touch apps.

We recommend that you get started with Getting Started. Then head over to the Programming Guide. We also have a Quickstart if you are impatient.

You are probably wondering why you should be interested in using Kivy. There is a document outlining our Philosophy that we encourage you to read, and a detailed Architectural Overview.

If you want to contribute to Kivy, make sure to read Contributing. If your concern isn’t addressed in the documentation, feel free to Contact Us.

User’s Guide

This part of the documentation explains the basic ideas behind Kivy’s design and why you’d want to use it. It goes on with a discussion of the architecture and shows you how to create stunning applications in a short time using the framework.

API Reference

The API reference is a lexicographic list of all the different classes, methods and features that Kivy offers.

Appendix

The appendix contains licensing information and an enumeration of all the different modules, classes, functions and variables available in Kivy.

License

Kivy is released under the terms of the GNU LGPL Version 3. You should have received a copy of the LGPL alongside your Kivy distribution. See the file COPYING in the Kivy root folder. An online version of the license can be found at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.txt

In a nutshell the license allows you to use Kivy in your own projects, regardless of whether they are open source, closed source, commercial or free. The one thing the license does enforce is that if you make changes to the Kivy sourcecode itself, you have to share those changes with us. For a more thorough legal explanation of the terms and conditions, please refer to the documents listed above.

For a list of authors, please see the file AUTHORS that accompanies the Kivy source code distribution (next to COPYING).

Kivy – Copyright 2011, The Kivy Authors. All rights reserved.