Desktop-native structural biology workspace — volumes, segmentations, and MolViewSpec views, all in one app.
License Build and Release MolView Studio Release Issues
About · Download · Getting Started · Development · Contributing
MolView Studio is a cross-platform desktop application for working with structural biology data. It lets you:
- Load structures and density volumes and explore them interactively with the modern Mol* (Molstar) viewer.
- Process volumes and run segmentations locally, powered by the volseg-tools Python library through a bundled FastAPI server.
- Build and inspect custom views using the MolViewSpec (MVS) format — annotate, compose, and share reproducible visualizations.
The app ships as a self-contained Electron desktop application with a local Python processing backend — no browser setup or cloud services required.
MolView Studio is available for Windows and Linux (macOS builds coming in a future release). Grab the latest installer from the Releases page, or update in place using the app's built-in auto-update feature.
- Node.js (LTS)
- Python 3.12
- Git
1. Build the local processing server
The server (FastAPI + volseg-tools) is packaged into a standalone binary with PyInstaller:
python -m pip install --upgrade pip pip install pyinstaller pip install -r src/server/requirements.txt npm run build:server
Tip: if you use uv, you can replace the PyInstaller steps with
npm run build:server:uv.
2. Install TS dependencies
npm install
3. Package the app
Windows:
npm run dist:win
Linux:
npm run dist:linux
macOS:
npm run dist:mac
Installers are written to the dist_electron/ output directory.
After building the server (see the Build server as developer wiki page), run the app in dev mode with hot reloading powered by Vite:
npm install npm run dev
Useful scripts:
| Script | Description |
|---|---|
npm run dev |
Run Electron + React UI with hot reloading |
npm run build |
Type-check and build the renderer bundle |
npm run lint |
Run ESLint |
npm run build:server |
Build the Python processing server binary |
npm run server |
Run the processing server directly (normally not needed) |
The app is split into three main parts:
src/ui— React 19, Mantine, Molstar (viewer, workspace, settings, and feature modules)src/electron— Electron main process (window management, IPC, file storage, auto-update)src/server— Python FastAPI service for volume processing and segmentation
More details on the individual parts, scripts, and the server are available on the project wiki.
There are many ways to participate in this project:
- Submit bugs and feature requests
- Improve documentation on the wiki
Licensed under the MIT license.
Copyright (c) 2025 – present, MolView Studio contributors.