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Installation

Step 1: Create a Python 3.10 (or 3.9, or 3.8) environment

The following documentation will only describe the installation for Python 3.10 but you can simply switch any mention of "3.10" with "3.9" or "3.8".

In order to install qudi as a python package and application, we strongly recommend creating an isolated Python 3.10 environment. Qudi needs very specific package dependencies that can otherwise mess up your system Python installation.

Another advantage of installing qudi in its own Python environment is, that you can easily uninstall qudi and all dependencies again by simply deleting this environment.

You can choose any environment name you like. For this guide we will choose qudi-env as the environment name.

⚠ WARNING:

There are many ways to create a Python environment depending on your OS, Python distribution and personal taste. There is no "standard way" of setting this up and you can find tons of tutorials and documentation out there on how to do this.

Outlined below are just two very common ways, using either the Python standard library (recommended) OR Miniconda/Anaconda.

Variant 1: Python standard library

⚠ WARNING:

Do not use this method if you are running an Anaconda/Miniconda distribution!
See variant 2 in that case.

Using the builtin venv module from the Python standard library we can create a Python environment in the current directory.
The entire environment will be placed in a sub-folder with the corresponding name and can be tracelessly uninstalled by simply deleting this folder again.

While this is to our knowledge the most robust and preferred way of setting up a Python environment for qudi, it has a small disadvantage. You can not change the Python version for the environment, meaning you can only set up an environment with the same Python version you created the environment with.
So make sure the Python interpreter you use for calling the following commands has version 3.10.x. If you are missing Python 3.10 on your system, you can download and install the right version from https://www.python.org/.

You can find OS specific commands to create the environment below.
If your Python 3.10 interpreter is not found on your PATH (e.g. if you have multiple versions of Python installed), you need to replace all python/python3 calls with the full path to the correct interpreter. On Windows you may also use the py launcher instead.

Windows users click here to expand

Check first if you are using Python version 3.10:

C:\> python -V
Python 3.10.11

Change to a desired working directory to create the environment in (here: C:\Software\qudi\):

C:\Software\qudi> python -m venv qudi-env

You should now see a new folder qudi-env in your current working directory.

Unix users click here to expand

Check first if you are using Python version 3.10:

foo@bar:~$ python3 -V
Python 3.10.11

Change to a desired working directory to create the environment in (here: /opt/qudi):

foo@bar:/opt/qudi$ python3 -m venv qudi-env

You should now see a new folder qudi-env in your current working directory.

Variant 2: Anaconda/Miniconda

⚠ WARNING:

While Anaconda and Miniconda are very popular Python distributions in the scientific community, we encountered occasional instabilities with binary package distributions like PySide2 in conjunction with conda environments.
We have not been able to narrow down the source of these problems so far.

Most of the time, qudi runs without any issues but should you encounter crashes or error messages coming from C++ extensions during startup, consider installing a "plain" Python distribution instead and install a Python environment according to variant 1.

If you are using Anaconda or Miniconda Python distributions, this is probably the way to go for you. This method uses conda to create the Python 3.10 environment.

If you have not installed a distribution yet, you should install the latest version of Anaconda or Miniconda first.

You can find OS specific commands to create the environment below.

Windows users click here to expand

You can execute these commands from any working directory since the environment will be created in an Anaconda/Miniconda specific default directory.

C:\> conda create --name qudi-env python=3.10
Unix users click here to expand

You can execute these commands from any working directory since the environment will be created in an Anaconda/Miniconda specific default directory.

foo@bar:~$ conda create --name qudi-env python=3.10

You can delete the environment again by calling:

conda env remove --name qudi-env

Step 2: Activate the new Python environment

Anything related to qudi and its package dependencies must be done in the new Python environment. Make sure to activate the environment in your command line before starting or (de-)installing any Python packages that should be used with qudi.

The process of activating the Python environment differs again depending on how you set up the environment in the first place.
We will describe environment activation for the two variants described in the previous step.

Variant 1: Python standard library

If you have installed the Python environment with the builtin venv package, you can find OS specific activation commands below (assuming qudi-env as environment name).
Basically there is an activate executable for every OS type in the newly created environment folder under .../qudi-env/Scripts/ .

Windows users click here to expand

⚠ WARNING:

If you are using the MS Windows PowerShell, you may need to allow script execution on your system if you have not done this before at some point.
Please refer to this thread for further information if you encounter any errors with the commands below.

Execute the activate script in qudi-env\Scripts\

C:\Software\qudi> cd qudi-env\Scripts\

C:\Software\qudi\qudi-env\Scripts> .\activate

Your command prompt should now have a prefix showing your environment name. In this example it would look like:

(qudi-env) C:\Software\qudi\qudi-env\Scripts>
Unix users click here to expand

Execute the activate script in qudi-env/Scripts/

foo@bar:/opt/qudi$ cd qudi-env/Scripts

foo@bar:/opt/qudi/qudi-env/Scripts$ source activate

You can deactivate the environment with the command deactivate.

Variant 2: Anaconda/Miniconda

If you have installed the Python environment with conda, you can activate the environment in your command line (assuming qudi-env as environment name) with:

conda activate qudi-env

And you can deactivate the environment with:

conda deactivate

Step 3: Install qudi-core

The qudi-core package installation provides you with the general qudi framework and a minimum running application. User application measurement modules need to be installed as namespace packages on top of the qudi-core package at a later stage (see step 4).

⚠ WARNING:

Basically you have to decide at this point what packages to install from source in development mode (code can be changed without installing qudi again).
Most users will not want to actively develop the qudi-core source code. On the other hand you probably want to edit your measurement modules source code occasionally while using qudi.

For this most common use-case we recommend installing qudi-core directly from the Python Package Index (PyPI) and installing the measurement module addons from source in development mode.
This enables you to fiddle with your measurement code later on and have the qudi-core installed as stable version that can be maintained via pip and the PyPI in a user-friendly way known from other Python packages.

⚠ WARNING:

Make sure you have your Python environment activated before executing anything described below (see previous step).

Variant 1: Installing from PyPI

This is as easy as installing any other Python package:

python -m pip install qudi-core

Variant 2: Installing from source (dev)

In order to install qudi-core from source, you need to copy the qudi-core repository to your computer.
There are mainly two ways of doing that:

OR

The latter option enables you to contribute code and/or to pull the latest development version from all branches, but it requires you to install git on your system.

NOTE: The exact directory location on your local machine does not matter as long as you keep it there and do not copy it around later on.

Once you have a copy of the source code on your local machine, you can change into this directory (top directory containing setup.py) and install qudi-core using pip with the development flag -e set:

python -m pip install -e .

All dependencies will be installed by pip and it will register several entry points that are executables within the Python environment:

command effect
qudi Starts qudi
qudi-config-editor Starts a standalone graphical configuration editor for qudi
qudi-install-kernel Installs and registers the qudi IPython kernel in your system
qudi-uninstall-kernel Uninstalls the qudi IPython kernel from your system

⚠ WARNING:

Installing qudi via pip will NOT automatically register the qudi IPython kernel in the system. You will lack the interactive IPython console in the qudi main GUI as well as any jupyter notebook support.

While you can use qudi without this IPython integration, we strongly recommend to call qudi-install-kernel after installing qudi via pip.

This has an effect on your entire system and not just the Python environment. It will overwrite any other kernels with name "qudi" registered for that user. In practice this should only pose a problem if you have multiple installations of qudi (in different environments). In that case you should call qudi-install-kernel everytime you switch qudi environments.

We are currently working on a full deployment of qudi including configuration of the installed application and not just a plain Python package installation to get around this minor inconvenience and some other usability issues.

Step 4: Install measurement module addons

Unless you have a robust deployment of measurement modules at hand that do not need to be altered too often, you may want to install any measurement module namespace packages from source.

If your measurement module package deployment is following the qudi project suggestions, you can install them exactly like described in the previous step.

If you are into quantum optics measurements with colorcenters in diamond or similar semiconductors, you may want to consider using the measurement modules package qudi-iqo-modules provided by the Institute for Quantum Optics (Ulm-IQO) under the LGPL v3 license.

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