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Linux/macOS/Windows (master) |
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Windows (master) |
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BSD, last build (branch/PR) |
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Coverity Scan (last) |
HIDAPI is a multi-platform library which allows an application to interface
with USB and Bluetooth HID-Class devices on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and macOS.
HIDAPI can be either built as a shared library (.so, .dll or .dylib) or
can be embedded directly into a target application by adding a single source
file (per platform) and a single header.
See remarks on embedding directly into your build system.
HIDAPI library was originally developed by Alan Ott (signal11).
It was moved to libusb/hidapi on June 4th, 2019, in order to merge important bugfixes and continue development of the library.
- Windows (using
hid.dll) - Linux/hidraw (using the Kernel's hidraw driver)
- libusb (using libusb-1.0 - Linux/BSD/other UNIX-like systems)
- macOS (using IOHidManager)
On Linux, either the hidraw or the libusb back-end can be used. There are
tradeoffs, and the functionality supported is slightly different. Both are
built by default. It is up to the application linking to hidapi to choose
the backend at link time by linking to either libhidapi-libusb or
libhidapi-hidraw.
Note that you will need to install an udev rule file with your application
for unprivileged users to be able to access HID devices with hidapi. Refer
to the 69-hid.rules file in the udev directory
for an example.
This back-end uses the hidraw interface in the Linux kernel, and supports both USB and Bluetooth HID devices. It requires kernel version at least 2.6.39 to build. In addition, it will only communicate with devices which have hidraw nodes associated with them. Keyboards, mice, and some other devices which are blacklisted from having hidraw nodes will not work. Fortunately, for nearly all the uses of hidraw, this is not a problem.