Unable To Install Sift On Macosx

Question

[Sam]

Hi,

Does anyone have any success installing SIFT on MacOSX 10.6? I could really use some advice.

Thanks!

[Michael]

from my experience, this QA format is not very good for debugging installation problems, also sift is seemingly only supported on windows and linux. Maybe ask the authors first? Another approach could be to run it in a VirtualBox.

[Michael]

I tried it, but the code is simply bad, not portable and there is no Makefile. There is a readme, but compiling using gcc doesn't work. I would think it's almost impossible to get this running.

[Simon Cockell]

Some clue as to the nature of your problem would probably go some way toward helping people provide you with answers.

[Neilfws]

Might help to explain briefly what SIFT is (with a URL) and state the exact problem with installation (e.g. are you getting an error message?)

[Simon Cockell]

I had a 10 minute attempt to get this working this morning (not very thorough I admit). Michael is right, OS X is unsupported, and although I suspect installation may be possible if you are prepared to work your way through a number of opaque GCC errors, it would actually probably be simpler to install it in a VM running Linux... OS X may be a certified Unix these days, but it is far from a typical Linux :)

[Russh]

I don't know precisely what you want to do with SIFT, but ANNOVAR http://www.openbioinformatics.org/annovar/ has a SIFT dataset available which you may be able to use instead of SIFT.

[Sam]

Thanks for your help everyone. Yea this code is very difficult to get up and running. I'm even experiencing trouble installing it on a linux box

Answer 1

[Pauline Ng]

Hi Daniel,

This is Pauline Ng, original author of SIFT. We have installed [SIFT on the Amazon Cloud](, so if you are having problems installing it, then you can start an instance of it on Amazon Web Services, with SIFT pre-installed. Instructions are here.

Right now, we are supporting the sequence submission and BLink submission, as those are the programs that people have the most problem with for installation. (Using the pre-computed databases are simple perl scripts with sql queries that you shouldn't have any problems with.)

You will have to pay 34 cents per hour to Amazon to use it (the instructions have a link to pricing).

Best,
Pauline
http://sift-dna.org

[Michael]

That is a nice paraphrasing for 'it doesn't compile on macos' right? ;)