Installation

Requirements

atlas needs Python 3.12 or newer. Check what you have:

python --version

It draws its window with PyQt5, so it also needs a graphical session. Over SSH that means X11 forwarding (ssh -Y) or a remote desktop; there is no terminal-only mode.

Install

From a checkout of the repository:

Just atlas

pip install -e .

Everything you need to open FITS files and use the built-in tools.

With ZMQ

pip install -e ".[zmq]"

Adds pyzmq, needed only for the ZMQ tool, which is off by default.

For development

pip install -e ".[dev,zmq]"

Adds pylint and pytest, the two checks CI runs. See Development.

A virtual environment is strongly recommended, so atlas and its Qt build stay out of your system Python:

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e .

Runtime dependencies are declared in pyproject.toml. The requirements.txt at the top of the repository exists only so that pip install -r requirements.txt still does the right thing; it installs atlas in editable mode with the ZMQ extra.

Check it worked

Installing puts an atlas command on your path:

atlas --list-profiles

--list-profiles prints the three bundled profiles and exits without opening a window, which makes it a good smoke test on a machine with no display:

detector
minimal
viewer

Then launch it properly:

atlas

Running without installing

atlas also runs straight from a checkout:

PYTHONPATH=src python -m atlas.main --profile viewer image.fits

This is handy when you are editing the source and do not want an editable install in the way, but note that --profile still needs the bundled YAML files in src/atlas/config/profiles/, which a checkout always has.

Optional: ImageStreamIO shared memory

The shared-memory tool reads ImageStreamIO segments directly with mmap, so there is nothing extra to install: no ImageStreamIOWrap, no pybind11, no cmake build. It does need a producer such as camerad writing to a segment, and a shared-memory directory it can find (see Shared memory for how that directory is resolved).

Next steps

Go to Quickstart to open your first image.