midasplatform / pyslicer

Midas Server viewable Python console for interacting with 3D Slicer

pyslicer

midas viewable python console to interact with slicer

To install and run the twisted based python server that will accept http requests from Midas and create Slicer jobs in response, first you will need to install a python2.6.

Download and extract a Slicer nightly binary, the directory where this is extracted to is SLICER_DIR (where the Slicer exe should be contained in).

Also, in the library/twserver.cfg file, set the path to your slicer exe like so:

slicer_path=SLICER_DIR/Slicer

Now change directories into your SLICER_DIR.

cd SLICER_DIR

As of Slicer Nightly Build 10-16-2012, you will no longer need to manually create the include path or copy over pyconfig.h

We will need a pyconfig.h header for python26 in order to install pip. You can get this from an ubuntu python system install of 2.6 at /usr/include/python2.6

Since we will also be compiling twisted, we will need all headers here, so go ahead and copy them over.

mkdir lib/Python/include
mkdir lib/Python/include/python2.6
cp /usr/include/python2.6/*.h lib/Python/include/python2.6/

Download and install distribute and pip, you will have to replace the path to the python exe with the path to your installed python 2.6 interpreter exe.

curl http://python-distribute.org/distribute_setup.py > distribute_setup.py
./Slicer --launch /usr/bin/python distribute_setup.py 
curl https://raw.github.com/pypa/pip/master/contrib/get-pip.py > get_pip.py
./Slicer --launch /usr/bin/python get_pip.py 

Now that pip is installed in your Slicer Python, you can run pip to install pydas and the pydas dependencies.

./Slicer --launch SLICER_DIR/lib/Python/bin/pip install pydas

You will need to install twisted, but I had trouble with this step:

./Slicer --launch SLICER_DIR/lib/Python/bin/pip install twisted

An alternate approach is to download the source of twisted, extract it yourself to TWISTED_DIR, then run this command there:

SLICER_DIR/Slicer --no-main-window --python-script setup.py install

Now you could run your twserver.py using your Slicer Python like this :

SLICER_DIR/Slicer --no-main-window --python-script twserver.py