Skip to content

Install#

Installing pymmcore-plus#

pymmcore-plus can be installed with pip:

pip install pymmcore-plus

# or, add the [cli] extra if you wish to use the `mmcore` command line tool:

pip install "pymmcore-plus[cli]"

or with conda:

conda install -c conda-forge pymmcore-plus

Installing Micro-Manager Device Adapters#

Just like the underlying pymmcore library, pymmcore-plus also relies on the device adapters and C++ core provided by mmCoreAndDevices. They can be installed in two ways:

  1. Use the mmcore command line tool

    If you've installed with pip install "pymmcore-plus[cli]", this library provides a quick way to install the latest version of micro-manager:

    mmcore install

    This will download the latest release of micro-manager and, by default, place it in a pymmcore-plus\mm folder in the user's data directory (e.g. C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\pymmcore-plus\mm). If you would like to modify the location of the installation, or the release of micro-manager to install, you can use the --dest and --release flags respectively.

    For more information on the install command, run:

    mmcore install --help

    To explore all the mmcore command line tool functionalities, run:

    mmcore --help

  2. Download manually from micro-manager.org

    Go to the micro-manager downloads page and download the latest release for your Operating System.

Critical

The device interface version MUST match between pymmcore and the Micro-Manager device adapters.

The device interface version of a given pymmcore version is the fourth part in the version number (e.g. v11.1.1.71.0), and can also be identified with the following command:

mmcore --version

or, if you didn't install with the cli extra:

python -c "print(__import__('pymmcore').CMMCore().getAPIVersionInfo())"

The device interface version of a given Micro-Manager installation can be viewed in Help > About Micro-Manager. Or you can look at the MMDevice.h file for the corresponding date, roughly here

Show the currently used Micro-Manager installation#

To see which micro-manager installation pymmcore-plus is using, you can run:

mmcore list

or, if you didn't install with the cli extra, you can use find_micromanager:

python -c "from pymmcore_plus import find_micromanager; print(find_micromanager())"

Set the active Micro-Manager installation#

By default, pymmcore-plus will look for a Micro-Manager folder in the default install location. On Windows this is C:\Program Files\, on macOS it is /Applications/ and on Linux it is /usr/local/lib/. To override these default device adapter search path, set the MICROMANAGER_PATH environment variable

export MICROMANAGER_PATH=/path/to/installation

If you want to permanently set the Micro-Manager installation path that pymmcore-plus uses, you can use the mmcore use command:

mmcore use <some path or pattern>

... where <some path or pattern> is either a path to an existing directory (containing micro-manager device adapters) or a pattern to match against directories returned by find_micromanager.

Alternatively, you can use the use_micromanager function, passing either a path to an existing directory, or a pattern to match against directories returned by find_micromanager:

python -c "from pymmcore_plus import use_micromanager; use_micromanager(path=..., pattern=...)"

On Linux#

On a linux based system the easiest approach is to just install the C++ core of micromanager, mmCoreAndDevices. To do that follow the build instructions in the micro-manager repo.