Installation

Note

this manual was adopted from nf-core

1) Install NextFlow

Nextflow runs on most POSIX systems (Linux, Mac OSX etc). It can be installed by running the following commands:

# Make sure that Java v8+ is installed:
java -version

# Install Nextflow
curl -fsSL get.nextflow.io | bash

# Add Nextflow binary to your PATH:
mv nextflow ~/bin/
# OR system-wide installation:
# sudo mv nextflow /usr/local/bin

See nextflow.io for further instructions on how to install and configure Nextflow.

2) Install the pipeline

2.1) Development

The whole pipeline is hosted in github. To install, you’ll need to download and transfer the pipeline files manually:

mkdir -p ~/my-pipelines/
git clone https://github.com/likelet/circPipe.git
cd ~/my_data/
nextflow run ~/my-pipelines/circPipe

To stop nextflow from looking for updates online, you can tell it to run in offline mode by specifying the following environment variable in your ~/.bashrc file:

export NXF_OFFLINE='TRUE'

2.2) Development

Note

If you would like to make changes to the pipeline, it’s best to make a

fork on GitHub and then clone the files. Once cloned you can run the pipeline directly as above.

3) Pipeline configuration

By default, the pipeline runs with the standard configuration profile. This uses a number of sensible defaults for process requirements and is suitable for running on a simple (if powerful!) basic server. You can see this configuration in conf/base.config.

Be warned of two important points about this default configuration:

  1. The default profile uses the local executor
    • All jobs are run in the login session. If you’re using a simple server, this may be fine. If you’re using a compute cluster, this is bad as all jobs will run on the head node.
    • See the nextflow docs for information about running with other hardware backends. Most job scheduler systems are natively supported.
  2. Nextflow will expect all software to be installed and available on the PATH

3.1) Software deps: Docker

First, install docker on your system: Docker Installation Instructions

Then, running the pipeline with the option -profile standard,docker tells Nextflow to enable Docker for this run. An image containing all of the software requirements will be automatically fetched and used from dockerhub (https://hub.docker.com/r/likelet/circpipe/).

3.2) Software deps: Singularity

If you’re not able to use Docker then Singularity is a great alternative. The process is very similar: running the pipeline with the option -profile standard,singularity tells Nextflow to enable singularity for this run. An image containing all of the software requirements will be automatically fetched and used from singularity hub.

If running offline with Singularity, you’ll need to download and transfer the Singularity image first:

singularity pull --name circPipe.simg shub://likelet/circpipe

Once transferred, use -with-singularity and specify the path to the image file:

nextflow run /path/to/circPipe -with-singularity circPipe.simg

Remember to pull updated versions of the singularity image if you update the pipeline.

3.3) Software deps: conda

If you’re not able to use Docker or Singularity, you can instead use conda to manage the software requirements. This is slower and less reproducible than the above, but is still better than having to install all requirements yourself! The pipeline ships with a conda environment file and nextflow has built-in support for this. To use it first ensure that you have conda installed (we recommend miniconda), then follow the same pattern as above and use the flag -profile standard,conda

4) Install Software Manually

If you want to install all the softwares manually in local, you can follow the steps: First you should ensure that you have conda installed (we recommend miniconda), then you can run the installation files install_tools_manually.sh and install_conda_package.sh in circPipe to install your softwares in your folder.

sh path/to/circPipe/install_tools_manually.sh
sh path/to/circPipe/install_conda_package.sh
source ~/.bashrc

Build necesssary Index

As to build the different indexes, you can simply download from igenome, or using your own genome file and annotation file with the command lines introduced in Parameters section. Or you can just ignore the steps because circpipe will build the indexes automatically.