Install

PLESTY Bench goes on the bench — the lab PC your instruments are plugged into. Each release carries an installer per platform, offered on plesty.net/download; older ones are on the releases page. An installer needs no administrator rights, installs the complete application — the console, the command line and the agent — and pins it to that release, so every bench installed from the same file runs the same version.

Windows

From plesty.net/download, download plesty-server-<version>-windows-setup.exe.
Run it. Windows may say “Windows protected your PC — Unknown publisher”: the installer is not signed yet. Press More info, then Run anyway.
On Plesty share, choose the Plesty share — the shared disk every machine of the lab reaches, as this machine mounts it, e.g. Z:\plesty — and this bench’s own folder in it, e.g. platform-a. Every device the bench starts writes in that folder. Skip if the disk is not mounted yet, and set both later in Server ▸ Configure….
On Select Additional Tasks, tick Create a desktop shortcut if you want one; press Next, then Install. The wizard shows the application being downloaded and installed — a few minutes on a first install.
At the end, leave Launch PLESTY Bench ticked and press Finish.

What it installs, all under your own user:

	Where
`uv` and a Python 3.12 of its own	where `uv` keeps them
the application	`%LOCALAPPDATA%\PLESTY Bench\app`
the commands `plesty-server` and `plesty-server-gui`	`%USERPROFILE%\.local\bin`
Start-menu entries	PLESTY Bench and Uninstall PLESTY Bench
the install log	`%LOCALAPPDATA%\PLESTY Bench\install.log`

If an install fails, the wizard names the reason; the install log has the rest.

The plesty-server command line has no Start-menu entry of its own: open a terminal (PowerShell or Command Prompt) and type plesty-server, or use the Terminal tab of the app. Later releases are installed from the app itself, Help ▸ Check for updates… (Upgrade a bench).

macOS and Linux

From plesty.net/download, copy the install command — curl -LsSf <install.sh of the release> | sh — or download install.sh itself.
In a terminal, run that command, or the downloaded script:
```
sh install.sh
```
It installs uv if it is missing, then the application as a uv tool, and adds PLESTY Bench to ~/Applications (Launchpad) on macOS or to the applications menu on Linux.

PLESTY_SERVER_VERSION=0.3.3 sh install.sh installs another release than the one the script came with.

Check it

Open PLESTY Bench from the Start menu, Launchpad or the applications menu. The console opens on an empty bench, and its first start offers the welcome demo; Help ▸ About names the version. In a terminal, plesty-server status answers with an empty table.

Next: The welcome demo experiment — a measurement on this PC with no instrument attached — or Set up a bench, your first instrument.

What else a bench needs

Nothing, in most labs. git is used only for modules installed from a repository (for field tests or development): a Windows bench fetches a portable one for itself, and on macOS or Linux it comes from the package manager. Instrument vendors’ own drivers — a VISA runtime, a camera SDK — are the device module’s requirement, and its documentation names them.

Without the installer

On macOS or Linux the same application is one command. The gui extra is the console; leave it out on a bench that runs without a window.

uv tool install "plesty-server[gui]"

This takes the newest release rather than a pinned one and adds no launcher; sh install.sh --launcher-only adds the launcher to an installation made this way.

On your own computer

To drive a bench from another machine you need only the client:

uv tool install plesty-bench              # the client
uv tool install "plesty-bench[control]"   # … with the control panels, which need Qt

See Work from another machine.

From a source checkout

To work on PLESTY Bench itself:

git clone https://gitlab.com/plesty/core/plesty-bench.git
cd plesty-bench && uv sync --extra gui
uv run python -m plesty.server gui

Update and uninstall

Upgrading to a newer release is Upgrade a bench; uninstalling — with or without the bench’s own data — and moving a bench to another PC are Uninstall a bench.