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Gucker

Gucker (from German: "gucken" / to watch) is a file watcher that can be used to watch files and directories for changes and can stream the new files to the Arkitekt Server.

Idea​

Gucker was developed to enable directly streaming files that are being produced (by your microscope) to the Arkitekt Server and to directly start the processing of the files in a workflow.

Installation​

Gucker comes as a bundled application installable from its Github Releases page.

Linux
Windows
Mac

Additionally you can install it via pip:

pip install gucker
On Mac support

Currently we provide no build for the Mac platform, but you can install it via pip on your Mac. We will add a Mac build in the future.

Usage​

Currently gucker is only available as a GUI while we are working on also enabling it as a command line tool. To start the GUI simply run the binary in the extracted folder or run the following command, if you installed it via pip:

gucker

Configuration​

Gucker requires you to set two directories, the "Import" directory and the "Export" directory. The "Import" directory is the directory that will be watched for changes while the "Target" directory is the directory where the files will be copied to when you explicitly export them.

Usage in Arkitekt Workflows​

Guckers main purpose is to establish a "Streaming Node" in Arkitekt workflows, and allows you to directly stream files to the Arkitekt Server and start the processing of the files in a workflow. For this just add the Stream Files node to your workflow and configure it to use the Gucker instance, that points to the Folder you want to watch.

Additionally you can also specify some filters to only stream files that match a certain file pattern in regexp. Here are some common patterns:

  • .* - matches all files
  • .*.tif - matches all tif files
  • .*.czi - matches all czi files
  • .*.nd2 - matches all nd2 files
  • .*[.tif|.tiff] - matches all jpg and png files
note

Regular expressions are a powerful tool to match file patterns, but can also be quite complex. We are recommending to use a tool like regex101 to test your regular expressions. Against the files you want to match, if it gets too complex.