Sardana Documentation

Sardana is a software suite for Supervision, Control and Data Acquisition in scientific installations. It aims to reduce cost and time of design, development and support of the control and data acquisition systems. Sardana development was started at the ALBA synchrotron and today is supported by a larger community which includes several other laboratories and individuals (ALBA, DESY, MAX IV, SOLARIS, ESRF).

Sardana is Free Software (under LGPL). You can download it from PyPI, and get support from its community and the latest code from the project page.

Sardana uses Taurus for control system access and user interfaces, it is based on Tango, and its command line interface (Spock) is based on IPython.

The documentation is organized as follows:

Installation

How to install Sardana and its dependencies.

Tutorials

Learning-oriented lessons for newcomers: install a demo system, run your first macro, write your first controller and execute your first scan.

How-to Guides

Task-oriented recipes for users who already know the basics and want to accomplish a specific goal.

Explanation

Conceptual material explaining the Sardana architecture and how and why it works the way it does.

Reference

Precise lookup material: macro catalog, APIs, Tango objects and configuration, plus migration guides and design records.

News and releases

Release notes and documentation for other Sardana versions.

Sardana in real experiments

Visual examples of Sardana in real beamline experiments, aimed at researchers and control-system users who want to understand where Sardana fits before following tutorials or API references.

Last Update:

Oct 28, 2026

Release:

3.7.2-alpha