Installation¶

VisFEM requires python >= 3.14 and is available from pypi. It is an application, so it is best installed as a tool into an environment of its own.

With uv¶

uv is the recommended way to install VisFEM. As a tool, it gets an isolated environment and the visfem command is put on the PATH:

uv tool install visfem
visfem --help

uvx visfem runs it without installing it permanently.

With pip¶

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate        # Linux and macOS
.venv\Scripts\activate           # Windows
pip install visfem

Development version¶

The current state of the develop branch is installed directly from GitHub:

uv tool install "visfem @ git+https://github.com/matthiaskoenig/visfem.git@develop"

or, with pip,

pip install git+https://github.com/matthiaskoenig/visfem.git@develop

To work on the repository itself, with the test and documentation tooling, see Contributing.

Dependencies¶

The app is built with trame and its vuetify and vtk widgets. The meshes are read with PyVista, VTK, meshio and h5py, the dataset descriptors are validated with pydantic. All of them ship wheels for Linux, macOS and Windows, so no compiler is needed.

The server renders off screen. On a headless Linux machine, e.g., in a container, VTK needs an OpenGL implementation such as OSMesa or EGL, see the Dockerfile of the deployment.