GBrowse Windows HOWTO
Contents
Abstract
This HOWTO describes a method for installing GBrowse on Windows.
Windows Installation
Before installing on Windows systems, you will need to install ActiveState Perl and the Apache web server. You may also wish to install a database management system such as MySQL.
Install ActiveState Perl
Go to ActiveState.com, and download the product "ActivePerl." This is a little confusing because web site tries to point you to the commercial product, ASPN Perl. At the current time, the full download URL for ActivePerl is:
http://www.activestate.com/Products/Download/Download.plex?id=ActivePerl
Choose the "MSI" package for Windows for Perl version 5.8. Once downloaded, launch the package, and it will install automatically. Note that due to differences in how ActiveState implemented Perl between Perl 5.6.1 and 5.8, we can only support Perl 5.8.
Please accept the default location for ActiveState Perl; this will make it easier to install GBrowse.
Install the Apache web server
Go to http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi. Select the most recent version of Apache, and choose the download marked "Win32 Binary (MSI Installer)." Once downloaded, launch the package and it will install automatically.
Please accept the default location for Apache.
Install the MySQL database (optional)
Do this only if you want to run the MySQL backend to GBrowse. You might want to wait until after you've played with the flat-file based implementation a bit and decide you need better performance.
Go to http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql. Select and download the most recent version of the Windows package. Once the package is downloaded, you will need to unpack it with the WinZip program. Then launch the installer.
After installing MySQL, install DBD::mysql; the easiste way to do that is via the ActiveState ppm utility.
Install GBrowse and its Perl Dependencies
Download the Generic-Genome-Browser/bin/gbrowse_netinstall.pl script. The script works best when Apache and ActiveState Perl 5.8 are already installed using the default locations. Execute the command in the DOS command shell:
>perl gbrowse_netinstall.pl
And answer questions that are presented (the defaults will be acceptable most of the time, but be careful if you've changed the location of ActiveState and/or Apache!). Note that it requires the LWP Perl package be installed, but it comes by default with ActiveState Perl 5.8. Also note that this script also works for Linux and MacOS as long as it is run as root (e.g. with sudo). Please see the GBrowse install doc for more information on what this script is doing.
Authors
Revision History
| Revision 1.0 2006-11-08 Scott Cain | First version |
| Revision 1.1 2007-04-17 Lincoln Stein | Second version |
