1. System Requirements
FITS is a Java program and requires Java version 1.8 or higher. To find out your Java version type java -version in a command-line window.
2. Installation
Download the latest official release from our Downloads page. If this is your first time downloading FITS, create a directory for FITS, for example:
- On Windows: C:\Program Files\Fits
- On Mac OS X: /Applications/Fits
- On *nix: /home/myuser/Fits
Extract the contents of your ZIP file to your FITS directory. You should end up with a another directory under your top-level FITS directory that has a version number embedded in it, for example on Windows: C:\Program Files\Fits\fits-1.3.0
3. Running FITS
FITS can be run on a command-line or within a program using the Java API.
4. FITS from the command-line
Run FITS on the command-line using one of the start-up scripts (fits.bat on Windows, fits.sh on Mac OS X and *nix).
For example on Windows 7:
- Open up a command line interface window: Click on Start -> Type in cmd in the lower-left box and hit enter
- Navigate to the directory where you installed FITS, for example: cd "..\..\Program Files\fits\fits-1.3.0"
- Execute FITS using the start-up script with the -h parameter to see the parameter options: fits.bat -h
For example on *nix:
- Open up a terminal window.
- Navigate to the directory where you installed FITS
-
If it not already, make the fits.sh file executable
- chmod +x fits.sh
-
Run the script named fits.sh
- ./fits.sh
Here are a couple examples of running FITS to get you started. These are relatively simple examples assuming Windows - more complex examples can be found in the on-line user manual.
- Run FITS against its release text file printing the FITS output to the terminal: fits.bat -i version.properties (or, on Linux, ./fits.sh -i version.properties)
- Run FITS against its release text file saving the FITS output to a file: fits.bat -i version.properties -o myoutput.txt
- Output the technical metadata only (in the TextMD format) for the file to the terminal: fits.bat -x -i version.properties
- Output the FITS output plus technical metadata (in the TextMD format) for the text file to the terminal: fits.bat -xc -i version.properties
-Xmx<size>
where <size> is in megabytes or gigabytes. For example: java -Xmx512m or java -Xmx5g
5. Using FITS' Java API
See the Developer Manual.
6. Learn more
After you are up and running see the User Manual for more documentation.