Getting started

Installation

You can download the latest release of DIALS from this site for Linux or Mac. Unless you intend to develop with the DIALS toolkit, we recommend downloading the latest Stable Release.

DIALS can be built on Windows, but this is somewhat experimental. See the wiki for details.

The installers are prepared as compressed archives. Once the download has completed, you should unpack using the appropriate commands on your system. For example, on Linux:

tar xJf dials-v<MAJOR>-<MINOR>-<PATCH>-linux-x86_64.tar.xz

The values of <MAJOR>, <MINOR> and <PATCH> will have to be substituted appropriately for the version of DIALS you have downloaded.

Once this completes, a new directory, dials-installer will be created. The installer script requires that it is run within that directory. For a “system-wide” installation in /usr/local, you can run this in an environment where you have the appropriate write permissions:

cd dials-installer
./install

Alternatively you can install for the current user in a dials/ directory under the home directory as follows:

cd dials-installer
./install --prefix=$HOME/dials

Sourcing the DIALS environment

Once installation is complete, to use the software we must put the suite of DIALS programs in the system PATH. This is achieved by sourcing a script. For example, in the BASH shell, and assuming DIALS was installed in $HOME/dials:

source $HOME/dials/dials-v<MAJOR>-<MINOR>-<PATCH>/dials_env.sh

As before, the values of <MAJOR>, <MINOR> and <PATCH> will have to be substituted appropriately for the version of DIALS you have installed.

There is also a dials_env.csh script for those who use a C shell rather than a Bourne-like shell.

Note

Sourcing this script does not produce any output; it simply sets the environment appropriately for DIALS programs.

To check that DIALS is correctly set up, you may like to try:

dials.version

If everything has worked properly you should see some output giving a DIALS version number, a Python version, and your installation path.

Built-in help

The major DIALS command line programs typically print a useful help message if run without any arguments. For example, try

dials.import

This provides examples of usage, a list of command-line options and a help message describing the function of the program. All DIALS programs support the option

dials.program -c

which will print a structured description of the parameters that the program will accept. By default, only the basic parameters are shown. To display all parameters up to an expert_level of 2, you would enter

dials.program -c -e2

In addition, it can be useful to display an expected type, a help string and other useful information about the parameters. We do that by increasing the attributes_level.

dials.program -c -e2 -a2

Parameters

Apart from the command-line switches, all DIALS programs also accept parameters in the form parameter=value. In most cases this will be sufficient though some less frequently used options may require “name space” clarification e.g. index_assignment.method=local. More complex parameter specifications can be written into a file, say myparams.phil and passed into the DIALS program as an input file.

Next steps

At this point you are ready to start processing data! We recommend checking out the tutorials for further details.