Project File Schema

EVAnalyzer project files (.evaproj) are JSON documents following a published JSON Schema (draft 2020-12). The schema is generated directly from the application’s own Rust types, so it always matches what a given release actually reads and writes.

It’s published at a stable URL on this site, refreshed from a pinned release of the main EVAnalyzer repository on every docs build:

https://evanalyzer.org/schema/project.schema.json

Machine-readable

Because it’s a real JSON Schema with a oneOf discriminated union for every pipeline command, this file is enough on its own to validate an existing .evaproj file or generate a new one programmatically - for example, from a script or an LLM - without needing to read prose documentation first.

Top-Level Structure

A project file’s root object (ProjectSettings) has these top-level fields:

Field	Description
schemaVersion	On-disk format version, used to migrate older project files forward.
metadata	Descriptive info: name, description, author, creation time.
images	The collection of images in the project and their processing state.
plate	Multi-well plate layout, for high-content screening projects.
classification	The project’s object class definitions - see Classification.
pipelines	The array of analysis pipelines - see below.

Pipelines and Steps

Each entry in pipelines (PipelineSettings) has:

• id - a unique pipeline ID.
• name - a display name.
• imageSource - which image this pipeline reads: a channel index ({"CHANNEL": 0}), a named in-memory buffer ({"MEMORY": "..."}), or "SCRATCHPAD" for object-only pipelines that don’t start from a raw image.
• enabled - disabled pipelines are skipped during analysis.
• steps - an ordered array of PipelineStepSettings, each an { enabled, command } pair.

command is a PipelineCommand - a discriminated union keyed by a type string, with one variant per pipeline command ("blur", "threshold", "connectedComponents", "stardist", "colocalization", and so on for all 31 commands). Each type value corresponds directly to a command documented in the Commands reference, and the matching schema $defs entry (for example BlurSettings) lists that command’s exact parameters, types, defaults, and limits.

A minimal single-step pipeline looks like:

{
  "id": "pipeline-1",
  "name": "Nuclei",
  "imageSource": { "CHANNEL": 0 },
  "enabled": true,
  "steps": [
    {
      "enabled": true,
      "command": {
        "type": "blur",
        "kernelSize": 5
      }
    }
  ]
}

Versioning

The schema is fetched from a specific release tag of the app repository (currently 0.1.0-alpha.16), not the floating main branch, so it always describes a real released version rather than in-progress changes. If the fetch fails during a docs build (for example, a GitHub outage), the previously published copy is kept rather than the build failing.