This document guides you through the installation of software necessary to participate in the workshop. To complete this setup, you will need:

  • A Macintosh or Windows workstation connected to the internet.
  • About 5 minutes.

Introduction

  • Attendees will use their own workstation/laptop to participate.
  • For simplicity, participants will log in to a pre-built server which has the necessary data, software, and configuration already installed.
  • While not required or recommended, advanced users may elect to install some software locally on their laptop; see advanced setup instructions.

How to get help

  • If you have problems/questions, please don’t hesitate to email us at: bioinformatics-workshops@umich.edu

  • When emailing it will speed things along if you could include the specific text of any error messages.

Setup steps

For the workshop you will access RStudio though your browser. This service is hosted through PositCloud, so you’ll need to register there first:

1. Register at PositCloud. PositCloud is free for light use. (Paid plans exist for more computationally demanding work.)

2. You can enter you email and a password -or- authenticate through an existing Google or Github account.

3. Once you have created your account, click below to open the workshop workspace in your browser.

  • You may need to login.
  • You will see a progress bar “Deploying project”
  • After a few moments, you should see a screen that looks similar to below. (You will see the Temporary Copy warning at the top of the page; that’s ok.)

  4. Click Save a Permanent Copy at the top to copy the workshop template project into your own working area.

5. After a moment, screen header will refresh and the Temporary Copy warning will be gone.

  6. Follow this link to see your copy of the workshop project.

  7. You can close and logout of your RStudio session by:

  • Clicking your username button in the top-right corner (highlighted in the picture above)
  • Clicking ⏻ Log Out
  • Close the browser tab.

Congratulations

You are ready for the workshop; thank you for taking time to set this up in advance.

A note on the Posit-Cloud compute environment

Please note that this environment is optimized for the exercises in this particular workshop but is likely unsuitable for analyzing your own datasets. In particular: - It is not sized for compute intensive operations or large storage. - It is not secured for sensitive data of any kind. - FYI, the workspace you just copied above is available to you after the conclusion of the workshop.

If you had problems or questions about the installation steps please see the How to get help section above for more assistance.