Common UNIX Printing System

Note: This branch is tracking a future CUPS 2.5.x feature release. Check out the "2.4.x" branch for CUPS 2.4.x. OpenPrinting CUPS is the most current version of CUPS, a standards-based, open source printing system for Linux® and other Unix®-like operating systems. CUPS supports printing to: [AirPrint™][1] and [IPP Everywhere™][2] printers, Network and local (USB) printers with Printer Applications, and Network and local (USB) printers with (legacy) PPD-based printer drivers. CUPS provides the System V ("lp") and Berkeley ("lpr") command-line interfaces, a configurable web interface, a C API, and common print filters, drivers, and backends for printing. The [cups-filters][3] project provides additional filters and drivers. CUPS is licensed under the Apache License Version 2.0 with an exception to allow linking against GNU GPL2-only software. See the files LICENSE and NOTICE for more information. Note: Apple maintains a separate repository for the CUPS that ships with macOS and iOS at . Once you have installed the software you can access the documentation (and a bunch of other stuff) online at and using the man command, for example man cups . If you're having trouble getting that far, the documentation is located under the doc/help and man directories. The lpadmin command is used to manage printers from the command-line. For example, the following command creates a print queue called "myprinter" for an IPP Everywhere printer at address "11.22.33.44": The -p option specifies the printer name. The -E option enables the printer and accepts new print jobs immediately. The -v option specifies the device URI for the printer, which tells CUPS how to communicate with the printer. And the -m option specifies the model (driver) to use, in this case the IPP Everywhere ("everywhere") driver that is used for AirPrint and IPP Everywhere printers as well as shared printers and printers supported through Printer Applications. Legacy printers are supported using PPD (PostScript Printer Description) files that describe printer capabilities and driver programs needed for each printer. CUPS includes several sample PPD files for common legacy printers: The sample drivers provide basic printing capabilities, but generally do not exercise the full potential of the printers or CUPS. Other drivers provide greater printing capabilities. CUPS recognizes many types of images files as well as PDF, PostScript, and text files, so you can print those files directly rather than through an application. CUPS uses [Weblate][WL] to manage the localization of the web interface, command-line programs, and common IPP attributes and values, and those likewise end up as pull requests on Github.