Like most web servers, running a Genome Browser installation at your institution, even for your own department, requires a Unix machine, disk space (6TB for hg19), and the resources to update the site and underlying OS regularly. You may want to consider these alternatives before embarking on a full UCSC Genome Browser installation directly on your server.
Embed the Genome Browser graphic in your web page
If you only want to include a genome browser view into your webpage for already existing genomes, you can use an <iframe> tag and point it to http://genome.ucsc.edu/cgi-bin/hgRenderTracks, which will show only the main browser graphic without any decorations.
You can then use various parameters to adapt this graphic to your use case (e.g. set the displayed position, switch tracks on/off or highlight a range with a color), see our manual pages for a list of the parameters.
Use Assembly Hubs
Assembly Hubs: Assembly Hubs allow you to prepare any FASTA file, add annotations and use the Genome Browser to visualize it. All you need is a webserver where you save the indexed genome sequence and files to annotate it, e.g. in BAM, bigBed or bigWig format.
Use Genome Browser in a Box
Genome Browser in a Box (GBiB): is a fully configured virtual machine that includes Apache and MySQL, and has behavior identical to the UCSC website. GBiB loads genome data from the UCSC download servers on the fly. Website and data updates are applied automatically every two weeks. By default, GBiB uses the VirtualBox virtualization software, so it can be run on any operating system, Windows, OSX and Linux. It does not require VirtualBox, the virtual machine image can easily be converted to e.g., VMWare or HyperV. For increased privacy, you can download the genomes and annotation tracks you need and use your GBiB off-line even on a laptop.
Install locally with the Genome Browser installation script (GBIC)
We recommend this only if none of the above options fulfill your needs. Our GBIC installation script will install a full local mirror of the UCSC website, for the assemblies you select. We support mirror site installations as time allows, and have many functional mirrors of the Genome Browser worldwide. For details, see the section below.
Install manually yourself, by following installation instructions
We do provide step-by-step instructions for local installation, but do not recommend this, if any other system works for you. The internet also has various pages with instructions, but they are often out of date and may cause problems later. For details on manual instructions, see the section below.
A license is required for commercial download and/or installation of the Genome Browser binaries and source code. No license is needed for academic, nonprofit, and personal use. To purchase a license, see our license Instructions or visit the Genome Browser store.
If you do not want to use our prepared virtual machine Genome-Browser-in-a-Box, we provide a Genome Browser in the Cloud (GBiC) installation program that sets up a fully functional mirror on all major Linux distributions.
It has been tested on Ubuntu 14/16, RedHat/CentOS 6 and 7, and Fedora 20. Preferably, the installation should be performed on a fresh Linux installation, as it deactivates the default site config file in Apache and fills the MySQL directory with numerous databases. The easiest way to accomplish this is to run the Genome Browser in the Cloud program in a new virtual machine. The program also works on Docker (see Dockerfile) and cloud computing virtual machines, and has been tested on those sold by Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
Like GBiB, the mirror installed by the GBiC can load the annotation data either from UCSC or a local database copy. If you load data from UCSC and use a cloud computing provider, it is highly advisable to run your instances in the US West Coast / San Francisco Bay Area or San Jose data centers; otherwise data-loading may be very slow.
To run the installation program, please see the GBiC user guide.
If the installation program does not work on your linux distribution or you prefer to make adaptations to your mirror, we also provide step-by-step installation instructions that cover the configuration of Apache, MySQL, the Genome Browser CGIs, temporary file removal and other topics, like data loading through proxies.
The following external websites were not created by UCSC staff and are of varying quality, but may be helpful when installing on unusual platforms.
UDR (UDT Enabled Rsync) is a download protocol that is very efficent
at sending large amounts of data over long distances. UDR utilizes rsync
as the transport mechanism, but sends the data over the UDT protocol.
UDR is not written or managed by UCSC. It is an open source tool created
by the Laboratory for Advanced Computing at the University of Chicago.
It has been tested under Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OSX, but may
work under other UNIX variants. The source code can be obtained through
GitHub. When using the GBIC installation
program, the -u option will use UDR for all downloads.
If you manually download data only occasionally, there is no need to change your method; continue to visit our download server to download the files you need. This new protocol has been put in place primarily to facilitate quick downloads of huge amounts of data over long distances.
With typical TCP-based protocols like http, ftp, and rsync, the transfer speed slows as the distance between the download source and destination increases. Protocols like UDT/UDR allow for many UDP packets to be sent in batch, thus allowing for much higher transmission speeds over long distances. UDR will be especially useful for users who are downloading from places distant to California. The US East Coast and the international community will likely see much higher download speeds when using UDR vs. rsync, http or ftp.
If you need help building the UDR binaries or have questions about how UDR functions, please read the documentation on the GitHub page and if necessary, contact the UDR authors via the GitHub page. We recommend reading the documentation on the UDR GitHub page to better understand how UDR works. UDR is written in C++. It is Open Source and is released under the Apache 2.0 License. In order for it to work, you must have rsync installed on your system.
For your convenience, we offer a binary distribution of UDR for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.x (or variants such as CentOS 6 or Scientific Linux 6). You'll find both a 64-bit and 32-bit rpm here.
Once you have a working UDR binary, either by building from source or by installing the rpm, you can download files from either of our our download servers in a fashion similar to rsync. For example, using rsync, all of the MySQL tables for the hg19 database can be downloaded using either one of the following two commands:
rsync -avP rsync://hgdownload.soe.ucsc.edu/mysql/hg19/ /my/local/hg19/
rsync -avP hgdownload.soe.ucsc.edu::mysql/hg19/ /my/local/hg19/Using UDR is very similar. The UDR syntax for downloading the same data would be:
udr rsync -avP hgdownload.soe.ucsc.edu::mysql/hg19/ /my/local/hg19/For questions about installing and mirroring the UCSC Genome Browser, contact the UCSC mailing list genome-mirror@soe.ucsc.edu. Messages sent to this address will be posted on the moderated genome-mirror mailing list, which is archived on a SEARCHABLE PUBLIC Google Groups forum.