Introduction to Beacon

Beacon is the server process, the corner stone of BLISS, since it provides services, upon which essential features of BLISS are built:

• configuration database
  • text files in YAML format
    • Official YAML documentation: https://yaml.org
    • BLISS YAML documentation: YAML in Beacon.
  • complete description of an entire beamline experimental setup at a centralized place: devices, sessions, etc.
• configuration editor web application
• settings, i.e. runtime configuration properties
• channels, to exchange data between different BLISS objects instantiated in different processes
• distributed lock management, to be able to lock and release resources for a particular Beacon client
• publishing of data produced during scans, for online data analysis or visualisation

Beacon relies on Redis for most of those services. Redis is an open source, in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache and message broker.

In addition, Beacon can be used as a TANGO database-compatible server, storing TANGO configuration information in Beacon YAML files.

Beacon services overview

Note

Many BLISS features depend on Beacon. In practice it is not possible to use BLISS without a Beacon server.