How to Install PyMuPDF in Google Colab (Beginner's Guide)

PDF Python Hub — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 17:05:24 +0000

This tutorial shows you how to install PyMuPDF. After completing this tutorial, your environment will be ready to start opening and inspecting PDF files.

Tutorial objectives

By the end of this tutorial, you'll be able to:

Install PyMuPDF in Google Colab.
Understand what a Python library is.
Understand the difference between a library and a package.
Understand what each part of the installation command does.
Verify that PyMuPDF was installed successfully.

What you'll learn

In this tutorial you'll learn:

What a Python library is.
What PyMuPDF is.
How to install PyMuPDF in Google Colab.
Why the package name is pymupdf.
What each part of the installation command means.
How to verify the installation.

Who this tutorial is for

This tutorial is for Python beginners who want to learn how to work with PDF files in Google Colab.

Prerequisites

Before starting, you should have:

A Google account.
A Google Colab notebook.

What is a Python library?

A Python library is a collection of pre-written code that you can reuse in your own programs. Instead of writing everything from scratch, you install a library and use its functions to perform common tasks.

You can think of a library as a toolbox or a package of ready-made features that saves you time and effort.

Library vs package: what's the difference?

In Python, you will often hear the words library and package used together.

A simple way to think about them:

A package is what you install using pip.
A library is the code you use in your Python program.

For beginners, they are often used almost interchangeably.

For example:

We install the package called pymupdf.
We use the PyMuPDF library in our Python code. It is common for the package name and library name to be slightly different.

What is PyMuPDF?

PyMuPDF is one of the fastest and easiest Python libraries for reading and analyzing PDF documents, making it popular for automation, document processing, and data extraction.

With PyMuPDF, you can:

Open PDF documents.
Count PDF pages.
Extract text.
Read document metadata.
Access images inside PDFs.
Inspect page dimensions.
Search for text.
Read annotations.
Render PDF pages as images.

Install PyMuPDF

To install PyMuPDF in Google Colab, run the following command:

%pip install -q -U pymupdf

Understanding the installation command

%pip
It is a Google Colab and Jupyter notebook command that installs Python packages directly into the environment used by your notebook. Although !pip often works, %pip is the recommended notebook magic command because it installs packages into the same Python environment used by the current notebook.

install
This tells pip that we want to install a package.

-q
Short for quiet.
It reduces installation messages so your notebook output stays cleaner.

-U
Short for --upgrade.
If PyMuPDF is already installed, this option upgrades it to the latest available version.

pymupdf
This is the name of the package installed by pip.
The package provides the PyMuPDF library.

Troubleshooting

ModuleNotFoundError

If you get this error after installing PyMuPDF, restart your Google Colab runtime.

Click Runtime → Restart session.
Run: import pymupdf

Verify the installation

Now let's check that PyMuPDF was installed correctly.

Run:

import pymupdf
print(pymupdf.__version__)

If a version number appears without any error messages, the installation was successful.

For example:
1.28.0

Your Python environment is now ready to work with PDF files.

What's next?

In the next tutorial, you'll open your first PDF file using PyMuPDF and begin exploring the information stored inside a PDF document.

Open the notebook

Open the Google Colab notebook for this tutorial and run the code as you follow along.
[Open in Google Colab]

This article originally appeared on our blog PDF Python Hub.
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