Getting Started

These somewhat minimal instructions should be enough to get you started

Download SWI-Prolog

Blip uses SWI-Prolog - this is easy to install on a variety of platforms. In future Blip will be available as a binary compiled on certain platforms - for now you have to download the source

Download Blip

Go to the download page and fetch the source of the latest stable release. Download, and install as follows:

cd blip-RELEASE
./configure
make
make install
          

sudo make install

Optional components

The following components are not required for most tasks. In time, even these optional dependencies may be removed

• BioPerl required for parsing some file formats
• go-perl required for parsing obo file format
• ODBC for database connectivity. You will need an ODBC driver for your particular DBMS, and you will need to download the SWI-Prolog source and install the optional odbc package

Setting up

Your life will be easier if you set up some bioresources. This is a configuration file telling blip where to go to find common data sources - for example, the Gene Ontology, Reactome, the GO MySQL database, your favourite genome, etc.

Developer options

This step is required for developers only. If you do not wish to make changes to the blip source, you can ignore this section.

Otherwise, add the following two lines to your

~/.plrc

% uninstalled modules use .pro suffix to avoid confusion with .pl
user:prolog_file_type(pro,prolog).
% location of blip prolog source
user:file_search_path(bio, HOME) :-
	(   getenv('BLIP_SRC', HOME)	->  true
        	;        
            HOME = '/users/me/cvs/blip/src'
	).
          

Using Blip

You're now ready to get started: you can proceed to the tutorial section, or if you are feeling confident, why not just go straight for the modules documentation?

Blip Scripts

Much of the blip functionality can be used via the blip script. See blipkit for details.