How to Create a Basic Kivy App

Introduction

In this tutorial, we will be building a basic application using which can shut down and restart our computer using Kivy GUI framework. To begin we will first need to install kivy on our computer.

Install modules

Open your terminal and run the command below to install kivy.

pip3 install Kivy

Create app

After installing the module above, create a file called app.py and import a few modules as shown below.

import subprocess
import os
import kivy
from kivy.app import App
from kivy.uix.boxlayout import BoxLayout
from kivy.uix.button import Button

After importing the modules above let’s now create a class that will handle the restart and shutdown functionality.

class ShutdownApp(App):
    def build(self):
        layout = BoxLayout(padding=10)
        shutdown_button = Button(text="Shutdown", on_press=self.shutdown)
        restart_button = Button(text="Restart", on_press=self.restart)
        layout.add_widget(shutdown_button)
        layout.add_widget(restart_button)
        return layout

    def shutdown(self, instance):
        subprocess.call(['shutdown', 'now'])

    def restart(self, instance):
        subprocess.call(['sudo', 'reboot'])

if __name__ == '__main__':
    ShutdownApp().run()

The above code first creates the shutdown and restart button, then a shutdown function is created that uses Linux shutdown commands since we are using a Linux machine. Finally, a restart function is created that uses the reboot command on Linux.