LilyPond Contributor's Guide: 4.2.1 Requirements for running LilyPond

### 4.2.1 Requirements for running LilyPond

This section contains the list of separate software packages that are required to run LilyPond.

- DejaVu fonts These are normally installed by default.
- FontConfig Use version 2.4.0 or newer.
- Freetype Use version 2.3.9 or newer.
- Ghostscript Use version 9.03 or newer.
- Guile Use version 1.8.8. It is possible to build LilyPond with version 2.x of Guile and most features will work, but this is not officially supported (yet). In particular, performance and especially the startup time will be worse.
- Pango Use version 1.36 or newer.
- Python Use version 3.5 or newer.
- International fonts. For example:

  Fedora:

  >     fonts-arabic
  >     fonts-hebrew
  >     fonts-ja
  >     fonts-xorg-truetype
  >     taipeifonts
  >     ttfonts-ja
  >     ttfonts-zh_CN

  Debian based distributions:

  >     emacs-intl-fonts
  >     fonts-ipafont-gothic
  >     fonts-ipafont-mincho
  >     xfonts-bolkhov-75dpi
  >     xfonts-cronyx-75dpi
  >     xfonts-cronyx-100dpi
  >     xfonts-intl-.*

  These are normally installed by default and are required only to create music with international text or lyrics.

#### LilyPond — Contributor’s Guide v2.22.2 (stable-branch).