Installation

Snakemake is available on PyPi as well as through Bioconda and also from source code. You can use one of the following ways for installing Snakemake.

Installation via Conda

On Linux and MacOSX, this is the recommended way to install Snakemake, because it also enables Snakemake to handle software dependencies of your workflow.

First, you have to install the Miniconda Python3 distribution. See here for installation instructions. Make sure to ...

  • Install the Python 3 version of Miniconda.
  • Answer yes to the question whether conda shall be put into your PATH.

Then, you can install Snakemake with

$ conda install -c bioconda snakemake

from the Bioconda channel.

Global Installation

With a working Python 3 setup, installation of Snakemake can be performed by issuing

$ easy_install3 snakemake

or

$ pip3 install snakemake

in your terminal.

Installing in Virtualenv

To create an installation in a virtual environment, use the following commands:

$ virtualenv -p python3 .venv
$ source .venv/bin/activate
$ pip install snakemake

Installing from Source

We recommend installing Snakemake into a virtualenv instead of globally. Use the following commands to create a virtualenv and install Snakemake. Note that this will install the development version and as you are installing from the source code, we trust that you know what you are doing and how to checkout individual versions/tags.

$ git clone https://bitbucket.org/snakemake/snakemake.git
$ cd snakemake
$ virtualenv -p python3 .venv
$ source .venv/bin/activate
$ python setup.py install

You can also use python setup.py develop to create a “development installation” in which no files are copied but a link is created and changes in the source code are immediately visible in your snakemake commands.