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Micro-Manager Source Code

The source code includes all Micro-Manager files (Java and C++) and all supporting files (project files, build scripts, etc.). However, to build the entire project a number of Open Source libraries and device SDKs must be installed. See the build instructions.

Note about the source code licensing terms

Micro-Manager is structured in three distinct layers: Graphical User Interface (GUI), Device Adapters and MMCore. All source files, except ones carrying a different license notice in the header, are copyright of University of California. GUI and Device adapters are distributed under the “BSD” license, while MMCore is distributed under “Lesser GPL” license. License text files are included in the source package, and each file should have a header stating the exact type of license. A good starting point to learn more about the Open Source Code licensing is http://www.opensource.org/. If you have any questions or need some clarification regarding our licensing terms please let us know: info@micro-manager.org

Git repository

The source code for Micro-Manager 2.x is located on GitHub at https://github.com/micro-manager/micro-manager in the main branch.

As of April 2021 the source code has been split into multiple Git repositories which are used as submodules of the main repository. In order to fully clone the source code please follow these instructions:

  1. Clone the main repository: git clone https://github.com/micro-manager/micro-manager

  2. Initialize all submodules: git submodule update --init --recursive

When updating to a new revision of the repository using git pull it is a good idea to run git submodule update --recursive in order to make sure that all submodules are also up to date.

Subversion repository containing dependencies

This is needed for building on Windows (SlikSVN provides the svn command):

svn checkout https://svn.micro-manager.org/3rdpartypublic

Note that this is a large repository and will take up about 5 GB of disk space.

If you already have a working copy of 3rdpartypublic created from the old URL (valelab4.ucsf.edu; you can check with svn info), then you do not need to check out a new copy from scratch. Instead you can use the command svn relocate https://valelab4.ucsf.edu/svn https://svn.micro-manager.org to point your working copy to the current URL.

To build on Linux and macOS, usually you only need the classext subdirectory of the repo (and svn supports checking out just a subdirectory):

mkdir 3rdpartypublic
svn checkout https://svn.micro-manager.org/3rdpartypublic/classext 3rdpartypublic/classext

A few device adapters (currently just Zaber) may use other directories of 3rdpartypublic on Linux.

On all operating systems, the 3rdpartypublic directory should be in the same parent directory as the micro-manager directory from Git.

Source code of legacy versions

  • The Micro-Manager 1.4 source code is in the mm1.4 branch of the GitHub repository.

  • The Micro-Manager 1.2 and 1.3 source code is temporarily unavailable; it will be imported into Git branches shortly.