Ensembl Website Installation Instructions - Version [[SPECIESDEFS::ENSEMBL_VERSION]]
These pages provide step-by-step instructions for installing your own version of the Ensembl web
site. They are intended to be complete; that is, if you install the site simply by following these
instructions, it should work.
This document is updated with each new release.
If you find any omissions, errors, or just confusing bits in the instructions, please send an email to
ensembl-webteam@sanger.ac.uk, and we'll try to fix things.
Hardware and software requirements
The Ensembl website system is built on open source software: Apache, mod_perl and MySQL. To install a
local mirror of Ensembl you will need:
- Apache 2 and mod_perl 2 - installation instructions below
- A local MySQL (or SQLite) database to store session configurations
- up to 500 Mbytes to install source code required by the web server (Apache, mod_perl, ensembl code etc)
- Depending on usage - temporary storage space for images/session information
- approx 5-600 Gbytes to install the Ensembl MySQL databases
Summary of Instructions
There are four main sections to these instructions:
- Site Structure
- Describes the directory structure of the site, and what the various sections do.
- Build/Install
- How to install all the components that make up the site.
- Configuration
- Instructions for configuring the site for your local set-up.
- Running the site
- How to start up, shut down, and generally maintain the site.
Troubleshooting an Ensembl install
There are a number of common issues with an Ensembl installation, below are listed so
frequently asked questions. For more details click on the question.
- Why does text shows up on MapView but not ContigView?
- Truetype fonts have not been correctly installed on configured.
- Which configuration files do I edit?
- Ensembl uses a plugin system which makes life easier to configure mirrors, by merging configuration files.
- Configurations are not stored if I don't have a local MySQL server?
- Ensembl can now store (limited) configuration settings against in SQLite database
- Mart isn't currently installed in the Ensembl mirror. How can I enable it?
- Mart requires some post CVS checkout changes and so we don't configure it by default, but it requires a plugin to enable it
- The main Ensembl website has user accounts can we enable them on our mirror.
- Yes, there are minor configuration changes required.
Before you start
Running the Ensembl web site can be rather taxing on hardware. At a minimum you will need:
- A UNIX-like OS (e.g. Tru64, Solaris, Linux, OS X, etc.)
-
Just over 0.5 Terabytes of free hard-disk to hold a complete set of MySQL databases, and about
the same again for downloading and unpacking the data. Depending on your requirements, you
may wish to only install data for one or more species. The size requirements are roughly:
[[INCLUDE::/info/software/website/installation/db_sizes.html]]