Installing pysam

Pysam can be installed through conda, pypi and from the repository. The recommended way to install pysam is through conda/bioconda.

Conda installation

To install pysam in your current conda environment, type:

conda config --add channels r
conda config --add channels bioconda
conda install pysam

This will install pysam from the bioconda channel and automatically makes sure that dependencies are installed. Also, compilation flags will be set automatically, which will potentially save a lot of trouble on OS X.

Pypi installation

Pysam provides a python interface to the functionality contained within the htslib C library. There are two ways that these two can be combined, builtin and external.

Builtin

The typical installation will be through pypi:

pip install pysam

Generally you will have the wheel package installed and this command will speedily install pysam from a pre-built wheel. Otherwise, or if you use pip’s --no-binary option, this will compile the builtin htslib source code within pysam and allow the configuration facilities described below to be used.

htslib can be configured at compilation to turn on additional features such support using encrypted configurations, enable plugins, and more. See the htslib project for more information on these.

Pysam will attempt to configure htslib to turn on some advanced features. If these fail, for example due to missing library dependencies (libcurl, libcrypto), it will fall back to conservative defaults.

Options can be passed to the configure script explicitly by setting the environment variable HTSLIB_CONFIGURE_OPTIONS. For example:

export HTSLIB_CONFIGURE_OPTIONS=--enable-plugins
pip install pysam

External

pysam can be combined with an externally installed htslib library. This is a good way to avoid duplication of libraries. To link against an externally installed library, set the environment variables HTSLIB_LIBRARY_DIR and HTSLIB_INCLUDE_DIR before installing:

export HTSLIB_LIBRARY_DIR=/usr/local/lib
export HTSLIB_INCLUDE_DIR=/usr/local/include
pip install pysam

Note that the location of the file libhts.so needs to be known to the linker once you run pysam, for example by setting the environment-varirable LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

Note that generally the pysam and htslib version need to be compatible. See the release notes for more information.

Installation from repository

pysam depends on cython to provide the connectivity to the htslib C library. The installation of the source tarball (.tar.gz) contains pre-built C-files and cython needs not be present during installation. However, when installing from the repository, cython needs to be installed beforehand.

To install from repository, type:

python setup.py install

For compilation options, see the section on Pypi installation above.

Requirements

Depending on the installation method, requirements for building pysam differ.

When installing through conda, dependencies will be resolved by the package manager. The pip installation and installation from source require a C compiler and its standard libraries as well as all requirements for building htslib. Htslib requirements are listed in the htslib/INSTALL file.

Installing from the repository will require cython to be installed.