rust-fitsio

FFI wrapper around cfitsio in Rust

Platform support

Platform	Support level
Linux arm	Tier 1
Linux x86_64	Tier 1
macos x86_64	Tier 1
Linux arm64	Tier 2
Linux i386	Tier 2
macos arm64	Tier 2
Windows msys2	Tier 3
Windows msvc	-

Where the tiers refer to:

• Tier 1: guaranteed to work, tested in CI
• Tier 2: should work but not tested by CI
• Tier 3: may work, and not tested by CI

MSRV

The minimal version of rust we support is 1.58.0.

Installation

fitsio supports versions of cfitsio >= 3.37.

cfitsio must be compiled with reentrant support (making it thread-safe) if it is to be compiled with the --enable-reentrant flag passed to configure. This affects developers of this library as the tests by default are run in parallel.

For example on a mac with homebrew, install cfitsio with:

brew install cfitsio --with-reentrant

Alternatively, it is possible to automatically have cargo automatically compile cfitsio from source. To do this, you are required to have a C compiler, autotools (to run the configure script) and make (to run the Makefile). This functionality is made available with the fitsio-src feature:

cargo build --features fitsio-src

For the time being, it's best to stick to the development version from github. The code is tested before being pushed and is relatively stable. Add this to your Cargo.toml file:

[dependencies]
fitsio = { git = "https://github.com/simonrw/rust-fitsio" }

If you want the latest release from crates.io then add the following:

[dependencies]
fitsio = "*"

Or pin a specific version:

[dependencies]
fitsio = "0.21.6"

This repository contains fitsio-sys-bindgen which generates the C wrapper using bindgen at build time. This requires clang to build, and as this is likely to not be available in general, I do not recommend using it. It is contained here but is not actively developed, and untested. Use at your own peril. To opt in to building with bindgen, compile as:

cargo build --no-default-features --features bindgen

or use from your Cargo.toml as such:

[dependencies]
fitsio = "0.21.6"

Documentation

fitsio
fitsio-sys
fitsio-sys-bindgen

Feature support

Supported features of the underlying cfitsio library that are available in fitsio are detailed in this tracking issue. If a particular function is not implemented in fitsio, then the underlying fitsfile pointer can be accessed through an unsafe API.

Examples

Open a fits file

let f = fitsio::FitsFile::open("test.fits");

Accessing the underlying fitsfile object

fn main() {
    let filename = "../testdata/full_example.fits";
    let fptr = fitsio::FitsFile::open(filename).unwrap();

    /* Find out the number of HDUs in the file */
    let mut num_hdus = 0;
    let mut status = 0;

    unsafe {
        let fitsfile = fptr.as_raw();

        /* Use the unsafe fitsio-sys low level library to call a function that is possibly not
       implemented in this crate */
        fitsio_sys::ffthdu(fitsfile, &mut num_hdus, &mut status);
    }
    assert_eq!(num_hdus, 2);
}

Development

See ./CONTRIBUTING.md