Installation steps¶

PyMca supports most operating systems and different version of the Python programming language.

Stand-alone Executable¶

Stand-alone applications (aka. frozen binaries) are supplied for Windows and MacOS. They do not require any additional dependency and can be downloaded from here. Just download the installer for your platform.

Python module¶

The best use of PyMca can be achieved installing PyMca as a python package inside an existing Python installation. For Windows and MacOS there are pre-compiled modules available in order to simplify the tast.

You can also install PyMca from its source code. While numpy and fisx are the only mandatory dependencies for command line usage, graphical widgets require Qt and matplotlib and management of HDF5 data files requires h5py.

This table summarized the the support matrix of PyMca:

System	Python vers.	Qt and its bindings
Windows	2.7, 3.5-3.6	PyQt4.8+, PyQt5.3+
MacOS	2.7, 3.5-3.6	PyQt4.8+, PyQt5.3+
Linux	2.7, 3.4-3.6	PyQt4.8+, PyQt5.3+

For all platforms, you can install PyMca5 from the source, see Installing from source.

Dependencies¶

Tools for reading and writing HDF5 files depend on:

h5py

The GUI widgets depend on the following extra packages:

A Qt binding: either PyQt5, PyQt4, PySide, or PySide2
matplotlib

The following packages are optional dependencies:

silx for enhanced widgets
qt_console for the interactive console widget.
PyOpenGL for 3D and scatter plot visualization

It is expected that h5py and silx become required dependencies within short because:

h5py will become the preferred input/output file format of PyMca
silx provides a better widget library than the one currently supplied by PyMca

The complete list of dependencies with the minimal version is described in the requirements.txt at the top level of the source package.

Build dependencies¶

In addition to run-time dependencies, building PyMca requires a C/C++ compiler, numpy and cython (optional).

On Windows it is recommended to use Python 3.5 or later, because of using a more recent compiler.

This project uses Cython (version > 0.21) to generate C files. Cython is now mandatory to build PyMca from the development branch and is only needed when compiling binary modules.

Linux¶

There are no frozen binaries or wheels available for linux. Nevertheless, there are strong chances that PyMca is available as a native package for your distribution.

If you need to build PyMca from its source code, and NumPy and fisx are not installed on your system, you need to install them first, preferably with the package manager of your system. If you cannot use the package manager of your system (which requires the root access), please refer to the Virtual Environment procedure explained in the silx documentation

Please refer to Installing from source

Note

The Debian packages python-pymca5 and python3-pymca5 will not install executables (pymca, pymcaroitool ...). Please install the pymca package.

Windows¶

The simple way of installing PyMca on Windows is to type the following commands in a command prompt:

pip install PyMca5

Note

This installs PyMca without the optional dependencies. Instructions on how to install dependencies are given in the Installing dependencies section.

This assumes you have Python and pip installed and configured. If you don’t, read the following sections.

Installing Python¶

Please follow the instructions suplied by the silx project http://www.silx.org/doc/silx/latest/install.html

Using pip¶

Configure your PATH environment variable to include the pip installation directory, the same way as described for Python.

The pip installation directory will likely be C:\Python35\Scripts\.

Then you will be able to use all pip commands listed in following in a command prompt.

Installing dependencies¶

All dependencies may be simply installed with pip:

pip install -r https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vasole/pymca/master/requirements.txt

Installing PyMca¶

Provided numpy is installed, you can install PyMca with:

pip install pymca

or

pip install PyMca5

MacOS¶

While Apple ships Python 2.7 by default on their operating systems, we recommend using Python 3.5 or newer to ease the installation of the Qt library.

The installation of PyMca can simply be performed by:

pip install -r https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vasole/pymca/master/requirements.txt

Then install PyMca with:

pip install pymca

or

pip install PyMca5

This should work without issues, as binary wheels of PyMca are provided on PyPI.

Installing from source¶

Building PyMca from the source requires NumPy and fisx installed that can be installed using:

pip install numpy
pip install fisx

Building from source¶

The most straightforward way is to use pip to take the sources from PyPI:

pip install PyMca5 --no-binary [--user]

Alternatively, the source package of PyMca releases can be downloaded from the pypi project page.

After downloading the PyMca5-x.y.z.tar.gz archive, extract its content:

tar xzvf PyMca5-x.y.z.tar.gz
cd PyMca5-x.y.z
pip uninstall -y silx
pip install . [--user]

Alternatively, you can get the latest source code from the master branch of the git repository: https://github.com/vasole/pymca

Known issues¶

There are specific issues related to MacOSX. If you get this error:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 1335: ordinal not in range(128)

This is related to the two environment variable LC_ALL and LANG not defined (or wrongly defined to UTF-8). To set the environment variable, type on the command line:

export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Advanced build options¶

In case you want more control over the build procedure, the build command is:

python setup.py build

There are few advanced options to setup.py build:

--no-cython: Prevent Cython (even if installed) to re-generate the C source code. Use the one provided by the development team.

It is not recommended to run the test suite of PyMca only after installation:

python -m PyMca5.tests.TestAll

Package the built into a wheel and install it:

python setup.py bdist_wheel
pip install dist/PyMca5*.whl

To build the documentation, using Sphinx:

python setup.py build build_doc

Testing¶

To run the tests of an installed version of PyMca, from the python interpreter, run:

import PyMca5.tests
PyMca5.tests.testAll()

To run the test suite from the command line run:

python -m PyMca5.tests.TestAll