Installation¶

Alpha software — not ready for production

vstimd is in early alpha. The APIs, wire protocol, and behaviour can change at any time, features are incomplete, and it has not been validated for experiments or data collection. Use it for evaluation and development only — do not rely on it in production yet.

Server¶

Linux dependencies¶

Ubuntu / Debian¶

sudo apt install build-essential pkg-config \
    libdrm-dev libudev-dev libinput-dev \
    protobuf-compiler

Fedora / RHEL¶

sudo dnf install gcc pkg-config \
    libdrm-devel systemd-devel libinput-devel \
    protobuf-compiler

Manual installation¶

The server is a Rust binary. You need a working Rust toolchain (stable, edition 2024), and node.js (v22 or later)

git clone https://github.com/braemons/vstimd.git
cd vstimd
make build
sudo make install

Package installation (planned)¶

A package will be available soon for Debian/Ubuntu-based distributions as well as RHEL-based distributions. This will include systemd service files and other configuration files. A Ubuntu PPA will be available soon.

Python client¶

Requires Python ≥ 3.12 and uv.

cd client/python
uv sync

To install into an existing environment:

pip install ./client/python

MATLAB client (planned)¶

A MATLAB client is planned but does not exist yet.

Building the docs¶

The documentation is built with MkDocs (1.x) and the Material theme. The build environment is declared in docs/pyproject.toml and managed with uv:

make docs

The published site is built automatically by Read the Docs (see .readthedocs.yaml), which runs the same uv run --project docs mkdocs build.