1. Installation

1.1. From brew

If you have brew installed on your system you should be able to install a recent version of KAT by simply typing:

brew install brewsci/bio/kat

Many thanks to @sjackman for this one!

1.2. From bioconda

If you use bioconda you can install KAT using :

bioconda install kat

1.3. From source

If you wish to install KAT from source, because you don’t have brew installed, or wish to ensure you have the latest version, first ensure these dependencies are installed and configured on your system:

  • GCC V4.8+
  • make
  • autoconf V2.53+
  • automake V1.11+
  • libtool V2.4.2+
  • pthreads (probably already installed)
  • zlib
  • Python V3.5+ with the tabulate, scipy, numpy and matplotlib packages and C API installed. This is optional but highly recommended, without python KAT functionality is limited: no plots, no distribution analysis, and no documentation.
  • Sphinx-doc V1.3+ (Optional: only required for building the documentation.

NOTE ON INSTALLING PYTHON: Many system python installations do not come with the C API immediately available, which prevents KAT from embedding python code. We typically would recommend installing anaconda3 as this would include the latest version of python, all required python packages as well as the C API. If you are running a debian system and the C libraries are not available by default and you wish to use the system python installation the you can install them using: sudo apt-get install python-dev.

Then proceed with the following steps:

  • Clone the git repository (For ssh: git clone git@github.com:TGAC/KAT.git; or for https: git clone https://github.com/TGAC/KAT.git), into a directory on your machine.
  • Change directory into KAT project: cd KAT
  • Build boost (this may take some time): ./build_boost.sh
  • Setup the KAT configuration scripts by typing: ./autogen.sh.
  • Generate makefiles and confirm dependencies: ./configure. The configure script can take several options as arguments. One commonly modified option is --prefix, which will install KAT to a custom directory. By default this is /usr/local, so the KAT executable would be found at /usr/local/bin by default. Python functionality can be disabled using --disable-pykat. Type ./configure --help for full list of options. Please check the output to ensure the configuration is setup as you’d expect.
  • Compile software: make. You can leverage extra cores duing the compilation process using the -j <#cores> option. Also you can see all command lines used to build the software by setting V=1.
  • Run tests (optional) make check. (The -j and V=1 options described above are also supported here.)
  • Install: make install. If you’ve not provided a specific installation directory, you will likely need to prefix this command with sudo in order to provide the permissions required to install to /usr/local.

If sphinx is installed and detected on your system then html documentation and man pages are automatically built during the build process. If it is not detected then this step is skipped. Should you wish to create a PDF version of the manual you can do so by entering the doc directory and typing make pdf, this is not executed by default.

NOTE: if KAT is failing at the ./autogen.sh step you will likely need to install autotools. The following command should do this on MacOS: brew install autoconf automake libtool. On a debian system this can be done with: sudo apt-get install autoconf automake libtool.

Python scripts

KAT will install some python scripts to your <prefix>/bin directory. If you selected a custom location for prefix and wish to access these scripts directly, then it may be necessary to modify your $PYTHONPATH environment variable. Ensure that <prefix>/lib/python<version>/site-packages, is on your PYTHONPATH, where <version> represents the python version to used when installing KAT e.g. /home/me/kat/lib/python3.6/site-packages. Alternatively, you could install the kat python package into a python environment by changing into the scripts directory and typing python setup.py install.