Downloading BEAST
BEAST can be downloaded from the following link:
This will download a compressed tar archive (a ‘.tgz’ file).
Installing JAVA
Installing OpenJDK 8
Ubuntu-based linux operating systems have Open JDK installed as their default Java installation. To install Open JDK 8 (both JRE and JDK), you can run the following commands:
sudo apt-get install openjdk-8-jre
sudo apt-get install openjdk-8-jdk
Installing Oracle Java 8
If you’d like to use Oracle Java instead of Open JDK, you will require the PPA maintained by Webupd8 Team before proceeding with the installation:
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-installer
Note: if the apt-add-repository command is not found, first install the following:
sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
The PPA also contains a package to automatically set Java environment variables, by simply running the following command:
sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-set-default
You can now edit the /etc/environment configuration file and add the following entries to set JAVA_HOME and JRE_HOME environment variables:
JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-oracle
JRE_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-oracle/jre
Installing BEAST
Downloading and running BEAST on Linux
Start by downloading and unpacking the compressed .tar.gz file:
tar -zxvf BEASTv1.10.4.tgz
You can now go to the /bin directory and run BEAUti and BEAST from this directory:
cd BEASTv1.10.4/bin
./beauti
./beast
Adding the executables to the system path
To add the BEAUti and BEAST executables to the system’s path (to run from outside the /bin directory), you need to edit your system’s profile:
nano ~/.bash_profile
and add the path to the /bin directory:
export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/BEASTv1.10.4/bin/
To reload the changes to the profile immediately without logging out or restarting your computer, run the following:
source ~/.bash_profile
Verify your current system’s path settings by typing:
echo $PATH
Creating symbolic links in a directory of choice
ln -s Downloads/BEASTv1.10.4/bin/beauti beauti
ln -s Downloads/BEASTv1.10.4/bin/beast beast
Running BEAST from a jar file (with GUI)
Go to the /lib directory where you extracted the linux .tar.gz file:
cd BEASTv1.10.4/lib
java -jar beauti.jar
java -jar beast.jar
Running BEAUti and BEAST from a jar file (without GUI)
In that same /lib directory, provide command-line options for BEAST to run with:
java -jar beast.jar -seed 1234 example.xml