EasyMirror and EasyImport: Simplifying the setup of a custom Ensembl database and webserver for any species

As the generation and use of genomic datasets is becoming increasingly common in all areas of biology, the need for resources to collate, analyse and present data from one or more genome projects is becoming more pressing. The Ensembl platform is a powerful tool to make genome data and cross-species analyses easily accessible through a web interface and a comprehensive API. Here we introduce the EasyMirror and EasyImport pipelines to facilitate the setup and hosting of custom Ensembl genome browsers.

EasyMirror (https://github.com/lepbase/easy-mirror) makes it possible to set up a mirror of any Ensembl or Ensembl Genomes (including Bacteria, Metazoa, Fungi, Plants and Protists) species in four simple steps that can be run in less than an hour on a fresh Ubuntu installation. This tool exploits the modular nature of the Ensembl codebase to allow a site to be set up with none, some or all of the data hosted locally.

EasyImport (https://github.com/lepbase/easy-mirror) extends this approach to simplify the import of genomic data for any species from standard flat files into the Ensembl database schema, ready to be deployed using EasyMirror. All that is needed to get started is a genome fasta file and the gene models in GFF format.

Documentation for both pipelines is available at http://easy-import.readme.io