Installing and Starting VisIt_
Pre-built binaries for VisIt_ are provided on the following platforms:
For an explanation of what fully and partially supported mean, see our section on :ref:`supported platforms <supported_platforms>`.
New versions are usually released every 2-3 months. Users can find releases at the VisIt releases page. See our section on :ref:`managing GitHub notifications <managing_github_notifications>` to get notified of new releases.
Download a binary release compatible with the machine on which you want to run VisIt_.
If you are installing VisIt_ on Linux, you will also need to download and use the visit-install
script.
Installing VisIt_ on platforms other than those listed here requires :ref:`building VisIt from sources <Building>`.
VisIt_ releases include an app-bundle for macOS packaged in a DMG image. Download and open the DMG file and copy the VisIt_ app-bundle to your applications directory or any other path.
Note
If you have a previous version of VisIt already installed, you may be prompted by macOS to decide if you want to Keep both versions or Replace the old version with the new version.
If you choose Keep both, macOS will automatically adjust the name of the new version to something like VisIt 2
.
The space will cause problems and it will have to be removed by changing the name to something without spaces like VisIt2
or VisIt-2
or VisIt-x.y.z
where x.y.z
is the version number of the installation.
If you do not have the necessary privileges to change the name, a system administrator's help may be needed.
To run VisIt_ double click on the VisIt_ app-bundle.
Alternatively, VisIt_ can be run on macOS from the Terminal
using a command of the form:
/Applications/VisIt.app/Contents/Resources/bin/visit
Note
Running from the Terminal
may work around issues accessing some folders on local storage or code signing and notarization.
The visit-install
script can also be used to install tarball packaged macOS binaries.
For this case follow the Linux installation instructions.
Installing VisIt_ on Linux (and optionally on macOS) is done using the visit-install
script.
Make sure that the visit-install
script is executable by entering the following command at the command line prompt:
chmod +x visit-install
The visit-install script has the following usage:
./visit-install version platform directory
The version argument is the version of VisIt_ being installed. The platform argument depends on the type platform VisIt_ is being installed for. The platform argument can be one of the following: linux, linux-x86_64, darwin. The directory argument specifies the directory to install VisIt_ into. If the specified directory does not exist then VisIt_ will create it.
For example, to install an x86_64 version of VisIt_ 3.2.2, use:
./visit-install 3.2.2 linux-x86_64 /usr/local/visit
This command will install the 3.2.2 version of VisIt_ into the /usr/local/visit
directory.
Note that when you enter the above command, the file visit3_2_2.linux-x86_64.tar.gz
must be present in the current working directory.
The visit-install
script will prompt you to choose a network configuration.
A network configuration is a set of VisIt_ preferences that provide information to enable VisIt_ to identify and connect to remote computers and run VisIt_ in client/server mode.
VisIt_ includes network configuration files for several computing centers with VisIt_ users.
After running visit-install
, you can launch VisIt_ using bin/visit
.
For example, if you installed to /usr/local/visit
, you can run using:
/usr/local/visit/bin/visit
We also recommend adding visit
to your shell's path.
For bash users this can usually be accomplished by modifying the PATH
environment variable in ~/.bash_profile
, and for c-shell users accomplished by modifying the path
environment variable in ~/.cshrc
.
The exact procedure for this varies with each shell and may be customized at each computing center, so please refer to your shell and computing center documentation.
VisIt_ release binaries for Windows are packaged in an executable installer. To install on Windows run the installer and follow its prompts.
The VisIt_ installation program adds a VisIt_ program group to the Windows Start menu and it adds a VisIt_ shortcut to the desktop.
You can double-click on the desktop shortcut or use the Start menu's VisIt_ program group to launch VisIt_.
In addition to creating shortcuts, the VisIt_ installation program creates file associations for .silo
, .visit
, and .session/.vses
files so double-clicking on files with those extensions opens them with VisIt_.
You can also run the installer from a command prompt, and pass it certain parameters to override defaults including running in silent mode. Available options are as follows:
-ALLUSERS Install for all users. Must be in admin-mode. Default : install for current user -SITE <site-name> Specifies host profiles to be installed (eg llnl). Default: None -PB <parallel bank> Specifies parallel bank (FOR LLNL host-profiles). Default: wbronze -DB <database reader> Specifies a default database reader for VisIt. (eg Silo, FLASH, etc). Default: None -DEV Install plugin development tools. Default: no plugin dev tools -LIBSIM Install libsim tools. Default: no libsim tools -AssociatePython Associate python files with VisIt. Default: don't set up association -AssociateCurves Associate curve files with VisIt. Default: don't set up association /S Make install silent. /D <installationdir> Change install directory to <installationdir>. Default is %PROGRAM FILES% for ALL USERS and %HOMEPATH% for single user. MUST BE THE LAST PARAMETER!
ffmpeg
is a high quality MPEG 4 encoder.
The VisIt_ movie wizard uses ffmpeg
if it is found in the user's search path.
ffmpeg
's licensing is incompatible with VisIt_'s so we do not ship and install ffmpeg
with VisIt_.
You can install ffmpeg
as part of a VisIt_ installation so that it is available for all user's.
To install ffmpeg
as part of a VisIt_ installation you would do the following steps.
- Get the
ffmpeg
executable for each platform of interest. - Copy the
ffmpeg
executable for each platform to the architecture specific bin directory. - Set the group and file permissions appropriately for each executable.
- Create a soft link from
ffmepg
tofrontendlauncher
in the bin directory.
Here we go through an example where we install ffmpeg
into VisIt_ 3.3.3, which has two architectures (linux-intel
and linux-x86_64
) installed.
The ffmpeg
executables are named ffmpeg.intel
and ffmpeg.x86_64
.
We will set the group to visit
and the file permissions to 775
.
cp ffmpeg.intel visit/3.3.3/linux-intel/bin/ffmpeg
chgrp visit visit/3.3.3/linux-intel/bin/ffmpeg
chmod 775 visit/3.3.3/linux-intel/bin/ffmpeg
cp ffmpeg.x86_64 visit/3.3.3/linux-x86_64/bin/ffmpeg
chgrp visit visit/3.3.3/linux-x86_64/bin/ffmpeg
chmod 775 visit/3.3.3/linux-x86_64/bin/ffmpeg
ln -s frontendlaucher visit/bin/ffmpeg
VisIt_ has many startup options that affect its behavior (see the :ref:`Startup Options <StartupOptions>` for complete documentation).