bioconda

Bioconda lets you install thousands of software packages related to biomedical research using the conda package manager.

It has great usage documentation, so check out how to get started using bioconda on its own website.

The first step (also described and linked to on the website) is to install conda, the package manager you need to use the bioconda channel. Here, we recommend using the mambaforge installation.

conda basics

There is a separate page with some basic conda commands` to get you started.

contributing to bioconda

While you will nowadays find most bioinformatics packages on bioconda (and checking out a package on bioconda is a great way of checking how often it is downloaded), you will sometimes encounter packages that are not available there. If you feel comfortable with installing such a tool manually, please consider contributing your solution to the channel in the form of a recipe. There is a whole documentation section dedicated to helping you contribute package recipes to bioconda.