JBrowse web quick start
In this guide, we'll get an instance of JBrowse running on your computer.
Pre-requisites
- Ability to run commands on the command line
- Node.js 12+
caution
If you are using apt
as your package manager, we recommend not using it to
install Node.js. Good alternatives include
NodeSource or
NVM.
Download
You can download JBrowse 2 by using the JBrowse CLI or by downloading and unpacking it manually. We recommend using the JBrowse CLI since it also includes utilities to help you configure JBrowse 2 once it is set up.
Downloading using the JBrowse CLI
The JBrowse CLI can help perform many tasks to help you manage JBrowse 2, such as:
- create a new instance of JBrowse 2 automatically
- update an existing instance of JBrowse 2 with the latest released version
- configure your JBrowse 2 instance
Installing the CLI tools
To install the JBrowse CLI, run
npm install -g @jbrowse/cli
After running this command you can then test the installation with
jbrowse --version
This will output the current version of the JBrowse CLI.
note
If you can't or don't want to globally install the JBrowse CLI, you can also use
the npx command, which
is included with Node.js, to run JBrowse CLI without installing it. Simply
replace jbrowse
with npx @jbrowse/cli
in any command, e.g.
npx @jbrowse/cli --version
Using jbrowse create
to download JBrowse 2
In the directory where you would like to download JBrowse 2, run this command
jbrowse create jbrowse2
Downloading manually
You can also download JBrowse 2 manually. Go to the
releases page of the
JBrowse 2 GitHub repository and find the latest release that is tagged
@jbrowse/web
. Download the ZIP file from that release. Make sure it is the ZIP
file that starts with jbrowse-web-
and not the "Source code" ZIP file. Once
you have downloaded the ZIP file, extract it to the location you would like to
have JBrowse 2.
Checking the download
Whether you used the JBrowse CLI or downloaded manually, the directory where you downloaded JBrowse should look something like this:
jbrowse2/
├── a586bb28a5bad4a3aba2.worker.js
├── a586bb28a5bad4a3aba2.worker.js.LICENSE.txt
├── a586bb28a5bad4a3aba2.worker.js.map
├── asset-manifest.json
├── favicon.ico
├── index.html
├── manifest.json
├── precache-manifest.52c8ba3337cf7ae812b37d874b2de030.js
├── robots.txt
├── service-worker.js
├── static/
└── test_data/
Running JBrowse 2
JBrowse 2 requires a web server to run. It won't work if you try to directly
open the index.html
in your web browser. We can use a simple server to check
that JBrowse 2 has been downloaded properly. Run
cd jbrowse2/
npx serve .
This will start a web server in our JBrowse 2 directory. Navigate to the
location specified in the tool's output. It will look something like
http://localhost:5000
. Once at that page, you should see a page that says that
the configuration is not found. That is expected, since we haven't configured
JBrowse 2 yet. It will look something like this:

Go ahead an click on the sample config to see a JBrowse 2 running with a demo configuration. It should look like this:

Congratulations! You're running JBrowse 2.
Next steps
Now that JBrowse 2 is set up, you can configure it with your own genomes and tracks. There are two ways you can configure JBrowse 2: with the JBrowse CLI (guide here) or with JBrowse 2's built-in graphical configuration editing (guide here).