1. Installation

BASTA depends on LevelDB and the python wrapper Plyvel as well as a few non-standard python libraries which can easily be installed using pip.

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Required Python Libraries (non levelDB)

• gzip
• hashlib

The easiest way to install the libraries is using the python package manager pip

pip install gzip hashlib

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LevelDB

LevelDB installation: MacOSX

The easiest way to install BASTA on MacOSX is through homebrew (https://brew.sh/) and pip.

brew install leveldb
pip install Plyvel

NOTE Often MacOSX can't find the leveldb header files. If so try:

pip install --global-option=build_ext --global-option="-I/usr/local/include" --global-option="-L/usr/local/lib" Plyvel

LevelDB installation: Ubuntu

LevelDB can be installed using aptitude:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python-leveldb
pip install Plyvel

Why LevelDB ?

Currently, BASTA uses levelDB (https://github.com/google/leveldb) for storage of NCBI taxonomies and mapping files. The reason is that the otherwise preferred database system SQLite can lead to locking errors when used on infrastructure that mounts hard drives using Network File System (NFS) which is often the case on compute clusters.

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Installing BASTA

BASTA is written in python, i.e., it doesn't have to be compiled. You only need to download it and are ready to go. To download BASTA either

• download the latest release (https://github.com/timkahlke/BASTA/releases) and extract the files
• use git to clone the directory by typing git clone https://github.com/timkahlke/BASTA on the command line

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Krona (optional)

BASTA provides a custom script to create Krona plots (https://github.com/marbl/Krona/wiki) from annotation files. To install KronaTools please follow the Krona installation guide.