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Bioconda is a channel for the conda package manager specializing in bioinformatics software. Bioconda consists of:

The conda package manager makes installing software a vastly more streamlined process. Conda is a combination of other package managers you may have encountered, such as pip, CPAN, CRAN, Bioconductor, apt-get, and homebrew. Conda is both language- and OS-agnostic, and can be used to install C/C++, Fortran, Go, R, Python, Java etc programs on Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.

Conda allows separation of packages into repositories, or channels. The main defaults channel has a large number of common packages. Users can add additional channels from which to install software packages not available in the defaults channel. Bioconda is one such channel specializing in bioinformatics software.

When using Bioconda please cite our article Grüning, Björn, Ryan Dale, Andreas Sjödin, Brad A. Chapman, Jillian Rowe, Christopher H. Tomkins-Tinch, Renan Valieris, the Bioconda Team, and Johannes Köster. 2018. “Bioconda: Sustainable and Comprehensive Software Distribution for the Life Sciences”. Nature Methods, 2018.

Bioconda has been acknowledged by NATURE in their technology blog.

Each package added to Bioconda also has a corresponding Docker BioContainer automatically created and uploaded to Quay.io.

Browse packages in the Bioconda channel: Available packages

Browse BioContainer packages: Biocontainers Registry UI

Bioconda is a derivative mark of Anaconda ®, a trademark of Anaconda, Inc registered in the U.S. and other countries. Anaconda, Inc. grants permission of the derivative use but is not associated with Bioconda.

The Bioconda channel is sponsored by Anaconda, Inc in the form of providing unlimited (in time and space) storage. Bioconda is supported by Circle CI via an open source plan including free Linux and MacOS builds.

Using Bioconda

Bioconda supports only 64-bit Linux and Mac OSX.

1. Install conda

Bioconda requires the conda package manager to be installed. If you have an Anaconda Python installation, you already have it. Otherwise, the best way to install it is with the Miniconda package. The Python 3 version is recommended.

See also

2. Set up channels

After installing conda you will need to add the bioconda channel as well as the other channels bioconda depends on. It is important to add them in this order so that the priority is set correctly (that is, conda-forge is highest priority).

The conda-forge channel contains many general-purpose packages not already found in the defaults channel.

conda config --add channels defaults
conda config --add channels bioconda
conda config --add channels conda-forge

3. Install packages

Browse the packages to see what’s available.

Bioconda is now enabled, so any packages on the bioconda channel can be installed into the current conda environment:

conda install bwa

Or a new environment can be created:

conda create -n aligners bwa bowtie hisat star

4. Join the team

Because our time is limited, the policy is to add a package if we need it ourselves. However, we invite anybody who wants to use Conda for bioinformatics to join the team and contribute new packages. To get started, have a look at our recipes and the Conda documentation. If you don’t want to join us permanently, you can also fork the recipes repository and create pull requests.

5. Spread the word

Consider adding a badge to your posters and presentations to promote that a tool can be easily installed from Bioconda.

Contributors

Others

Bioconda has over 250 contributors, see here.

Contributor documentation

The rest of this documentation describes the build system architecture, the process of creating and testing recipes, and adding recipes to the bioconda channel.

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