Installation and Getting Started¶
Installing Epics Apps¶
The latest version of the epicsapps package is 2025.1.5. For existing Python installations, this can be installed with:
pip install epicsapps
or upgraded with:
pip install --upgrade epicsapps
For installation into an existing Python environment,
This pip
command will all the required packages needed on Windows
and macOS.
On Linux, however, the pip install
command will not have a binary
package for wxPython, and may try to build wxPython from source. This
requires a large number of development packages on Linux, and rarely
works without some effort.
There are conda packages for wxPython from the conda-forge channel. Since using Anaconda Python provides many othed common scientific pacakges, 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.
Installation Scripts¶
Table of EpicsApps Install scripts
Operating System
Installer Script
Windows
macOS or Linux
To install a full standalone installation of Python with EpicsApps,
download GetEpicsApps.bat for Windows or GetEpicsApps.sh for
Linux and MacOS and run that script. This will install a full
Anaconda Python environment in a folder named
C:\Users\<YourName>\epicsapps
or
C:\Users\<YourName>\AppData\Local\epicsapps
on Windows or in a
folder called epicsapps
in you Home Folder on Linux or macOS, and
will also put folder called Epics Apps
on your desktop with links
to the GUI Applications.
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
stripchart PV Stripchart
adviewer [filename] Area Detector Viewer
instruments [filename] Epics Instruments
pvlogger [filename] PV Logger data collection
pvlogview PV Logger data Viewer
microscope [filename] Sample Microscope Viewer
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.