Original Publication: https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.5175

SECAPR is available as a conda package on the bioconda channel. This makes installation of the SECAPR pipeline with all dependencies very simple. Follow the instructions on this page to get the SECAPR pipeline set up and ready to use.

Conda is a software and environment manager, that makes installation of new software and of required dependencies very simple and straightforward. If you don't already have conda installed on your computer, you can rather quickly and easily install the light-weight version Miniconda.

Download the Python3 version of Miniconda for your operating system.

Windows users can download the exe file and install it by double clicking on the file and following the instructions.

If you are a Mac user, choose the pkg conda download file for installing conda using a graphic user interface. Alternatively you can download the bash file (same for Linux). In that case you need to open a command line window, navigate to the folder containing the miniconda download, and install it with sh Miniconda3-*.sh.

Once installed you can use conda via a bash command line terminal. Mac and Linux users can simply use the default Terminal software. Windows users are recommended to use the Anaconda Powershell Prompt, which is automatically installed with Miniconda, instead of the regular Command Prompt.

From your bash-command line terminal add the following channels to your conda installation manager. These channels are the locations where conda finds all required software dependencies.

conda config --add channels defaults;
conda config --add channels conda-forge;
conda config --add channels bioconda;    

Besides enabling easy installation, conda also functions as an extremely light-weight virtual environment manager. This means you create a virtual environment on your system and install software within that environment without interferring with your main system. For example if you download a conda package that has a specific R version as dependency, you can download it in a virtual environment and it will not affect your current R version that you are using on computer. You can easily connect and disconnect from these virtual environments you create with conda, see below.

Since the SECAPR pipeline has many third-party dependencies, which may effect existing installations of those softwares on your computer, we strongly recommend to install SECAPR in a virtual conda environment. Here we will name this environment secapr_env, but you can give it any name you want.

This is super easy with conda. All you have to do to install SECAPR and all its dependencies in a virtual environment is to run the following command:

conda create -n secapr_env secapr

In case the above command results in an endless wait while conda is trying to solve the environment, something is not working the way it should with the conda environment creation (we are currenlty investigating what causes this issue for some users).

Instead you can install the SECAPR environment directly from the GitHub repo. For this, first create the secapr environment manually and connect to it:

conda create -y -n secapr_env
conda activate secapr_env
# in case the previous command didn't work, use the one below instead
source activate secapr_env

In case you have a newer Apple computer with an Apple chip (M1 or M2), run the following line while connected ot your secapr_env environment. This will make sure that all packages are compatible.

# only run the command below if you have an Apple computer with an Apple chip!!
conda config --env --set subdir osx-64

Now download the file containing the installation instructions with wget and execute it with sh.

If you don't have wget installed on your computer you can install it with conda install wget.

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AntonelliLab/seqcap_processor/master/recipe/install_secapr_env.sh
sh install_secapr_env.sh

If you can't run wget on your machine, you can instead access the file manually here and simply copy it's content into your command line terminal.

More information about installing SECAPR, including installation of previous versions and using docker containers, can be found by clicking on the badge below:

To activate the newly created secapr_env environment, type:

conda activate secapr_env

When the environment is activated, all the necessary software dependencies will be available in the standarad path, e.g. when you type samtools the samtools version required for SECAPR will be executed. After you are done using SECAPR, you can deactivate the environment to switch back to your standard environment with this command:

conda deactivate

Check if you are connected to the correct environment (there should eb a star in front of secapr_env in the output of this command):

conda info --envs

In case you are not connected remember to always connect to the secapr_env before using SECAPR, by typing:

conda activate secapr_env

To test if the SECAPR installation is working, run the basic help function:

secapr -h

You should see an output with all available SECAPR functions. You can check run the help command for individual functions by typing secapr name_of_function -h, e.g.:

secapr clean_reads -h

The development version of SECAPR is stored on this GitHub page and contains the newest updates, which might not yet be available through the conda version. However you need to install the SECAPR environment with conda first by following the steps above. Once the environment is installed, you can update SECAPR to the development version by following these steps:

1. Connect to your SECAPR environment:

   conda activate secapr_env

2. Download the latest SECAPR version from GitHub

3. Unzip the downloaded file

4. Move the unzipped directory to a safe location on your computer, i.e. not on your Desktop or Download folder. This will be the path where SECAPR will be executed from in the future.

5. Enter the unzipped SECAPR directory from your command line, replace /path/to with the path where you storred the folder:

    cd /path/to/seqcap_processor-master

6. Remove the installed conda SECAPR version:

   conda remove --force secapr

7. Install SECAPR from the folder

   python setup.py install