You see, for the past couple of years, I’ve been a bit frustrated because OS X does not come with a whole lot of Perl modules pre-installed, and for all I googled, I couldn’t find an “idiot’s” guide for moderately-savvy-but-not-expert users like myself to install modules and dependencies on demand.

The only instructions I could find point to Fink, which basically installs modules in a path that isn’t included in the Perl @INC variable, meaning you have to manually specify the full path to the modules in every script — which is not a lot of fun if you’re developing on OS X and deploying on Red Hat, for instance.

Moreover, Fink doesn’t seem to make every module available, and it’s not very easy to determine which Fink package you need to install if you need a particular module.

So, with a script that called on several apparently unavailable modules, and a deadline looming, I finally decided to suck it up and figure out how to use CPAN to install them:

1) Make sure you have the Apple Developer Tools (XCode) installed.

These are on one of your install discs, or available as a huge but free download from the Apple Developer Connection [free registration required] or the Mac App Store. I thought I had them, but apparently when we upgraded that computer to Tiger, they went missing.

If you don’t have this stuff installed, your installation will fail with errors about unavailable commands.

1.5) Install Command Line Tools (Recent XCode versions only)

(Thank you to Tom Marchioro for informing me about this step.)

Older versions of XCode installed the command line tools (which are required to properly install CPAN modules) by default, but apparently newer ones do not. To check whether you have the command line tools already installed, run the following from the Terminal:

$ which make

This command checks the system for the “make” tool. If it spits out something like /usr/bin/make you’re golden and can skip ahead to Step 2. If you just get a new prompt and no output, you’ll need to install the tools:

1. Launch XCode and bring up the Preferences panel.
2. Click on the Downloads tab
3. Click to install the Command Line Tools

If you like, you can run which make again to confirm that everything’s installed correctly.

2) Configure CPAN.

$ sudo perl -MCPAN -e shell

perl> o conf init

This will prompt you for some settings. You can accept the defaults for almost everything (just hit “return”). The two things you must fill in are the path to make (which should be /usr/bin/make or the value returned when you run which make from the command line) and your choice of CPAN mirrors (which you actually choose don’t really matter, but it won’t let you finish until you select at least one). If you use a proxy or a very restrictive firewall, you may have to configure those settings as well.

If you skip Step 2, you may get errors about make being unavailable.

3) Upgrade CPAN

$ sudo perl -MCPAN -e 'install Bundle::CPAN'

Don’t forget the sudo, or it’ll fail with permissions errors, probably when doing something relatively unimportant like installing man files.

This will spend a long time downloading, testing, and compiling various files and dependencies. Bear with it. It will prompt you a few times about dependencies. You probably want to enter “yes”. I agreed to everything it asked me, and everything turned out fine. YMMV of course. If everything installs properly, it’ll give you an “OK” at the end.

4) Install your modules. For each module….

$ sudo perl -MCPAN -e 'install Bundle::Name'

or

$ sudo perl -MCPAN -e 'install Module::Name'

This will install the module and its dependencies. Nice, eh? Again, don’t forget the sudo.

The first time you run this after upgrading CPAN, it may prompt you to configure again (see Step 2). If you accept its offer to try to configure itself automatically, it may just run through everything without a problem.

There are a couple of potential pitfalls with specific modules (such as theLWP::UserAgent / HEAD issue), but most have workarounds, and I haven’t run into anything that wasn’t easily recoverable.

And that’s it!

Did you find this useful? Is there anything I missed?

Install latest Perl (with supporting multithreading) and CPANMinus.

 $ cd
 $ git clone git://github.com/tokuhirom/plenv.git ~/.plenv
 $ git clone git://github.com/tokuhirom/Perl-Build.git ~/.plenv/plugins/perl-build/
 $ echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.plenv/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
 $ echo 'eval "$(plenv init -)"' >> ~/.bashrc
 $ source ~/.bashrc
 $ plenv install 5.18.1 -Dusethreads
 $ plenv rehash
 $ plenv global 5.18.1
 $ plenv install-cpanm

• git is a distributed revision control and source code management software which can help you to download files from GitHub server.
• echo means "print".
• >> means adding the output into the end of the file, while > means adding the output by overwriting the whole file. Please use> with additional cares.
• In Linux system, there are two types of outputs when you execute a command. One is called standard output (or sometimes STDOUT for short), and the other is a standard error (STDERR). 1> is for STDOUT only, 2> is for STDERR only, and &>means for both. In default > is the same to 1>.
• exec is execution.
• Remember to install Perl in supporting multithreading (with option -Dusethreads), which is important for many NGS analysis packages (e.g. Trinity). In this setting, you can use multiple CPU for Perl software.
• Install the CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) manager software, CPANMinus, by install-cpanm.

You can use plenv global and plenv local to change the different version of Perl to fulfil different needs of your Perl software.

For example, if the specific version of Perl is not compatible with your script, you can switch to the different version by:

 $ plenv local 

• It is similar to set the local version of your script language when you use pyenv and rbenv as the following.

Put the following path into ~/.bashrc file.

export PERL5LIB="$HOME/.plenv/build/perl-5.18.1/lib"

Install BioPerl and PerlIO::gzip

CPANMinus is a very good Perl module manager, use cpanm to install BioPerl can save you a lot of time. Here are some useful modules:

$ cpanm Bio::Perl
$ cpanm Bio::SearchIO
$ cpanm PerlIO::gzip

For more information, please visit: https://github.com/tokuhirom/plenv

Currently CSBB provides 13 modules focused on analytical tasks like performing upper-quantile normalization on expression data or convert genome wide gene expression to z-scores when comparing expression data from different platforms.

More at https://github.com/skygenomics/CSBB-v1.0

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/skygenomics/CSBB-v1.0

Address of the bookmark: http://cbb.sjtu.edu.cn/course/database/beginning.pdf

Address of the bookmark: http://bioinformaticsonline.com/blog/view/710/how-to-install-perl-modules-manually-using-cpan-command-and-other-quick-ways

Many of the Perl scripts require that the VCF files are compressed by bgzip and indexed by tabix (both tools are part of the tabix package, available for download here). The VCF files can be compressed and indexed using the following commands

bgzip my_file.vcf
tabix -p vcf my_file.vcf.gz

http://vcftools.sourceforge.net/perl_module.html

Address of the bookmark: http://vcftools.sourceforge.net/perl_module.html

This is a short post giving steps on how to actually install R packages. Let’s suppose you want to install the ggplot2 package. Well nothing could be easier. We just fire up an R shell and type:

> install.packages("ggplot2")

In theory the package should just install, however:

• if you are using Linux and don’t have root access, this command won’t work.
• you will be asked to select your local mirror, i.e. which server should you use to download the package.

Installing packages without root access

First, you need to designate a directory where you will store the downloaded packages. On my machine, I use the directory /data/Rpackages/ After creating a package directory, to install a package we use the command:

> install.packages("ggplot2", lib="/data/Rpackages/")
> library(ggplot2, lib.loc="/data/Rpackages/")


It’s a bit of a pain having to type /data/Rpackages/ all the time. To avoid this burden,  we create a file .Renviron in our home area, and add the line R_LIBS=/data/Rpackages/ to it. This means that whenever you start R, the directory /data/Rpackages/ is added to the list of places to look for R packages and so:

> install.packages("ggplot2")
> library(ggplot2)

just works!

Setting the repository

Every time you install a R package, you are asked which repository R should use. To set the repository and avoid having to specify this at every package install, simply:

• create a file .Rprofile in your home area.
• Add the following piece of code to it:


cat(".Rprofile: Setting UK repositoryn")
r = getOption("repos") # hard code the UK repo for CRAN
r["CRAN"] = "http://cran.uk.r-project.org"
options(repos = r)
rm(r)


I found this tip in a stackoverflow answer .

Getting Started with Nextflow

Objectives Understand

What a workflow management system is.

Understand the benefits of using a workflow management system.

Explain the benefits of using Nextflow as part of your bioinformatics workflow.

Explain the components of a Nextflow script.

Run a Nextflow script.

Introduction to Bioinformatics workflows with Nextflow and nf-core

Getting Started with Nextflow

Address of the bookmark: https://carpentries-incubator.github.io/workflows-nextflow/aio/index.html