HOW-TO: Installing Thonny on the Raspberry Pi

Thonny is a great little editor for Python that supports Python, MicroPython, as well as virtual environments. Thonny has its own package manager that can pip install packages in your environment(s).

However if you previously installed Thonny with the aptitude package manager in the Raspberry Pi OS, you may have gotten a slightly older version with some bugs in the package manager.

So, the following steps can be followed to replace this with the newest bug-free version (as of October 15, 2025)

If you had previously installed Thonny, you may uninstall it via

sudo apt remove thonny

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pip remove thonny

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To install the latest version, do not use apt or pip. Instead, get the installer from the source as follows, at the bash terminal:

bash <(wget -O - https://thonny.org/installer-for-linux)

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Thonny should be installed and accessible from the GUI. To make it runnable from the command prompt, you may also add it to the path as follows:

echo 'export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/apps/thonny/bin"' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

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Confirm the functionality by running thonny from the command line as follows:

thonny

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