Installation

✅ Verified · no code on this page ·

The badge reports the whole docs-verify suite, not this chapter alone.

There are three ways in, depending on what you want to do. None of them require EPICS Base — Spvirit speaks PVAccess itself.

Python

pip install spvirit

That is the whole story on Linux (x86_64, aarch64), macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon), and Windows x86_64: those five platforms get prebuilt abi3 wheels, so there is no compiler involved. Python 3.9 or newer.

It also brings the command-line tools. spvirit depends on the spvirit-tools package, so the twelve binaries below land on your PATH in the same step — no Rust toolchain, and inside the virtualenv rather than in ~/.cargo/bin.

Check it:

$ python -c "from importlib.metadata import version; print(version('spvirit'))"
0.1.19

(The module itself has no __version__ attribute — ask the package metadata, as above.)

On any other platform pip falls back to the sdist and builds from source, which needs a Rust toolchain.

Command-line tools

Twelve binaries: spget, spput, spmonitor, spinfo, splist, spsearch, spexplore, sptable, spserver, spsine, spdodeca, and spget_compare.

pip install spvirit-tools

Prebuilt wheels for the same five platforms as above, so no compiler is involved. The binaries install into the environment's bin (or Scripts) directory, which puts them on PATH whenever that environment is active. This package is what pip install spvirit pulls in, so if you already have the bindings you already have these.

Or, with a Rust toolchain:

cargo install spvirit-tools

rustup is the usual way to get one. Stable is what CI builds against. This route installs into ~/.cargo/bin and is the one to use on platforms without a prebuilt wheel.

Either way, check it:

$ spget --help

Rust library

Add whichever crates you need. They are strictly layered, so asking for spvirit-client pulls in spvirit-codec and spvirit-types for you.

[dependencies]
spvirit-client = "0.1"   # search, connect, get, put, monitor
spvirit-server = "0.1"   # .db parsing, the Source trait, the PVA server
spvirit-codec  = "0.1"   # low-level PVAccess encode/decode
spvirit-types  = "0.1"   # the Normative Type data model

Most of this site uses spvirit-client and spvirit-server. You will also want Tokio — both are async.

From source

For hacking on Spvirit itself, or to run the examples this site includes:

git clone https://github.com/ISISNeutronMuon/spvirit
cd spvirit
cargo build --release

The binaries land in target/release/. Examples run straight from the workspace:

cargo run -p spvirit-server --example simple_server

Python from source

The bindings are built with maturin:

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate      # Windows: .venv\Scripts\activate
pip install maturin
cd spvirit-py
maturin develop --release

After maturin develop the spvirit module is importable from that venv.

A note on ports

PVAccess uses TCP 5075 and UDP 5076 by default, and discovery is UDP broadcast. If a client cannot find a server that is definitely running, the firewall is the first thing to suspect — on Windows especially, and on any host where the two are on different subnets.

Next

Your first PV.