Installation and Getting Started

The latest version of the epicsapps package is 2025.1.2, which can be installed with:

pip install epicsapps

Many of the Epics Applications provide GUI forms and displays using wxPython.

For Windows and macOS X, all dependencies can be reliably installed with the pip command above, including Python using Anaconda Python.

On Linux, PyPI does not have a binary package for wxPython for Linux, so pip install may try to build wxPython from source. This requires a large number of development packages on Linux, and rarely works without some effort. On the other hand, there are conda packages for wxPython from the conda-forge channel. In addition, some system-provided Python packaging also include wxPython with its packaging tools.q

Using Anaconda Python is recommended and common for many scientific applications, and is common at many facilities using Epics. If using Anaconda Python, you can first do:

conda install -c conda-forge wxpython

and then:

pip install epicsapps

This approach will work on all systems, and is recommended on Linux.

Getting Started

Installing the epicsapps package will install a command-line script epicsapps that can be used to launch the main epicsapps GUI applications. This works as:

epicsapps [options] appname  [filename]

where options can be

  • -h, –help: show this help message and exit

  • -m, –makeicons create desktop and start menu icons

  • -p, –prompt prompt for configuration on startup

  • -n, –no-prompt suppress prompt, use default configuration

  • -c, –cli run as a command-line program.

and appname can be one of

  • adviewer [filename] Area Detector Viewer

  • instruments [filename] Epics Instruments

  • microscope [filename] Sample Microscope Viewer

  • pvlogger [filename] PV Logger data collection

  • pvlogview PV Logger data Viewer

  • stripchart PV Stripchart

and filename is an optional configuration YAML file.

Creating Desktop Shortcuts

Running:

epicsapps -m

will create a folder called “Epics Apps” on your desktop with links to launch the main GUI applications.