Course Setup

Workshop environment

If attending a version of this workshop running by the Sheffield Bioinformatics Core, you will get access to a fully-working Unix environment that can be accessed from your web-browser. As part of the course setup will receive a web-address that is unique to each participant. These will only work for the duration of the workshop.

You will receive a link to a spreadsheet containing a set of IP Addresses for each participant

Enter the following address in your web browser, replacing IP_ADDRESS with your own IP.

http://IP_ADDRESS:6901/?password=vncpassword

e.g. 

http://3.8.149.23:6901/?password=vncpassword

Or the following will prompt you for a password, which is vncpassword.

http://IP_ADDRESS:6901

This environment has some of the features common to a desktop environment such as Windows or Max OSX, but is also able to run command-line tools. We have pre-installed several NGS tools for the workshop.

Once the environment has been opened, a new Terminal can be opened using the Applications menu (top-left) and selecting Terminal Emulator (second option down). We will be using this terminal for the majority of the workshop.

Before proceeding, we need to enter the following command in the Terminal window and then press ENTER.

HOME=/home/dcuser

We will start with a general introduction to the command-line, before looking at specific examples in Bioinformatics

Click Here for next part

Running the environment on your own machine after the workshop

Both Mac OSX and Windows 10 have the ability to run some of the commands presented in this course to navigate around a file system, copy files and list directories. However, you may prefer to practice in a “safe” environment, such as that used during the workshop. Furthermore, the NGS tools presented may be difficult to install.

You can launch the same computing environment on your own machine using a tool called Docker.

Docker is an open platform for developers to build and ship applications, whether on laptops, servers in a data center, or the cloud.

• Or, it is a (relatively) painless way for you to install and try out Bioinformatics software.
• You can think of it as an isolated environment inside your exising operating system where you can install and run software without messing with the main OS
  • Really useful for testing software
  • Clear benefits for working reproducibly
• Instead of just distributing the code used for a paper, you can effectively share the computer you did the analysis on
• For those of you that have used Virtual Machines, it is a similar concept

Installing Docker

Mac

• Mac OSX - 10.10.3 or newer
• Older Macs

Windows

• Windows 10 Professional
• Other Windows

Once you have installed Docker using the instructions above, you can open a terminal (Mac) or command prompt (Windows) and type the following to run the environment

docker run  --rm -d -p 5901:5901 -p 6901:6901 --privileged sheffieldbioinformatics/unix-training

Entering the address in your web browser should display the environment

http://localhost:6901/?password=vncpassword

Using the environment to analyse your own data

With the default settings, the computing environment is isolated from your own laptop; we can neither bring files that we create back to our own OS, or analyse our own data.

However, adding an -v argument allows certain folders on your own OS to be visible within the environment.

Assuming the files I want to analyse are to be found in the folder PATH_TO_FASTQ, the following command would map that directory to the folder /data

docker run --rm -d -p 5901:5901 -p 6901:6901 --privileged -v /PATH_TO_FASTQ/:/data sheffieldbioinformatics/unix-training

At the terminal, we should be able to see our files with the ls command

ls /data

However, please bear in mind that when running an analysis using this method you will be using the resources (CPU, RAM etc) on your own machine. In other words, it is not replacement for using a remote cluster with large amounts of memory (see next section).