Rapid depletion of reserved fossil fuel, this has made biomass-based bioenergy research becoming a research hotspot in the energy field in recent years. Making the most of renewable biomass can provide an excellent opportunity to develop economical biofuel production processes. Compared with ethanol and biodiesel, biobutanol has more advantages. Therefore, production of butanol from renewable lignocellulosic biomass has been widely studied in recent years. In order to obtain butanol from renewable biomass, some key scientific problems, such as the selection of raw material, low yield of product, toxicity of the inhibitor to the producing strain, need to be solved. In this study, the pretreatment of raw materials in the process of biobutanol fermentation with lignocellulose biomass as raw materials, the effect of inhibitors on butanol-producing strains, the detoxification of hydrolysate and the selection of strains resistant to inhibitors were reviewed. The opportunities and challenges in the production of butanol from lignocellulose were also discussed.