Installation

Quick start

Basically, download ASCIIGenome-X.Y.Z.zip from releases, unzip, copy ASCIIGenome and ASCIIGenome.jar to a directory of your liking and that’s it.

For example, in the commands below replace version number with the latest from releases:

wget https://github.com/dariober/ASCIIGenome/releases/download/vX.Y.Z/ASCIIGenome-x.y.z.zip
unzip ASCIIGenome-x.y.z.zip

cd ASCIIGenome-x.y.z/
chmod a+x ASCIIGenome
cp ASCIIGenome.jar /usr/local/bin/ # Or else in your PATH e.g. ~/bin/
cp ASCIIGenome /usr/local/bin/     # Or else in your PATH e.g. ~/bin/

With conda

ASCIIGenome is available as a bioconda package and it can be installed with the conda package manager:

conda install -c bioconda asciigenome

With Homebrew

ASCIIGenome can also be installed through brew / Linux Brew, although it is still not an official package:

brew install https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dariober/ASCIIGenome/master/install/brew/asciigenome.rb

A little more detail

ASCIIGenome.jar requires Java 1.8+ and this should be the only requirement. There is virtually no installation needed as ASCIIGenome is pure Java and should work on most (all?) platforms. Download the zip file ASCIIGenome-x.x.x.zip from releases, unzip it and execute the jar file with:

java -jar /path/to/ASCIIGenome.jar --help

To avoid typing java -jar ... every time, you can put both the helper script ASCIIGenome and the jar file ASCIIGenome.jar in the same directory in your PATH and execute with:

ASCIIGenome [options]

Note

This part below has nothing to do with ASCIIGenome specifically. These are just general instructions to add executable files to your PATH.

For Unix users: If you have administrator rights and you want to make ASCIIGenome available to all users, a popular choice of installation directory is /usr/local/bin/, e.g.:

cp ASCIIGenome.jar /usr/local/bin/
cp ASCIIGenome /usr/local/bin/

If you don’t have administrator rights (i.e. you get a Permission denied error) you can instead copy to a directory that you have on your PATH and where you have permission to write. A popular user directory for executable files is $HOME/bin (e.g. /home/myName/bin or /Users/myName/bin or short ~/bin). e.g.:

cp ASCIIGenome.jar ~/bin/
cp ASCIIGenome ~/bin/

If ~/bin does not exist or is not on your PATH create it with:

mkdir ~/bin/

And to add to it to your PATH edit your profile file to add the new directory. E.g. edit ~/.bash_profile to:

PATH=/home/myName/bin:$PATH

Then reload the profile file or log off and log back in to make the changes effective.

Note the helper is a bash script. To set the amount of memory available to java use the -Xmx option as e.g. java -Xmx1500m -jar ....

If for some reason the text formatting misbehave, disable it with the -nf option.

Compiling the source code

From version 1.13 ASCIIGenome is built using the gradle build tool. If you want to edit the source code and re-compile it to an executable jar, all you need to do is:

# Get source
git clone https://github.com/dariober/ASCIIGenome.git
cd ASCIIGenome

./gradlew clean
./gradlew build -x test

The executable jar file will be in build/libs/ASCIIGenome.jar. The -x test option builds the code without running the tests.