Install SRA Toolkit on UNIX OS

SRA Toolkit is the set of programatic tools Sequence Read Archive (SRA) provides for accessing information in their .sra files.  The toolkit can be downloaded for a variety of platforms here, but in this post I will focus on installing the toolkit on a UNIX platform.

The first step is to download to the directory you want the program saved in and extract the program:

	wget "http://ftp-trace.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sra/sdk/current/sratoolkit.current-centos_linux64.tar.gz"
	tar xzf sratoolkit.current-centos_linux64.tar.gz

view raw sra_download.sh hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Next, you need to configure the toolkit by going into the bin directory and opening the java configuration script (make sure you have X11 forwarding enabled):

java -jar sratoolkit.jar

view raw sra_configure.sh hosted with ❤ by GitHub

For the most part you can accept defaults when you walk through the setup, just make note of the directory you specified during configuration.  You should be all setup!  Check out other blog entries for SRA here.