As was announced in OMB memorandum M-15-13 on June 8, 2015, NCBI and all Federal systems will be transitioning to using HTTPS-only protocols before the end of 2016. This change will affect any software that uses NCBI APIs such as the E-utilities or NCBI software toolkits such as sra-tools, ncbi-vdb or ngs.

The NLM and NCBI may implement the switch to HTTPS-only as early as September 30, 2016.

In particular, software products that depend on sra-tools, ncbi-vdb or ngs may not function as expected after September 30 unless they are properly updated from this site or by the software provider.

If you use software that accesses NCBI SRA data in any way, your software will likely be affected by this change. Please check with your software provider for recent udpates or patches, and be sure to acquire these before September 30.

If you develop software that relies on sra-tools, ncbi-vdb or ngs in any way, you will likely need to update your code so that it accesses NCBI using HTTPS.

We have released new tools with version 2.8.0 that are HTTPS compatible and M-15-13 compliant as of October 7, 2016. Please be certain to update all of your binaries and configuration files.

1. Create an ncbi source directory if needed. While this is not strictly required, our configuration scripts will benefit by being able to locate related projects without asking for explicit paths: $ mkdir ncbi

2. Check out the sources: $ cd ncbi $ git clone https://github.com/ncbi/ngs-tools.git

3. If you have not yet installed ngs and/or ncbi-vdb, please do so now: $ git clone https://github.com/ncbi/ngs.git $ git clone https://github.com/ncbi/ncbi-vdb.git and follow directions at https://github.com/ncbi/ngs/wiki/Building-and-Installing-from-Source and https://github.com/ncbi/ncbi-vdb/wiki/Building-and-Installing-from-Source respectively.

4. Configure the build: $ cd ngs-tools $ ./configure By default, configure will select a build-output directory under your $HOME and will install under /usr/local/ncbi/ngs-tools on Linux. The default settings can be changed, of course. For all options, you can run: $ ./configure --help

5. Make the tools: $ make

6. Install the tools as admin (you may be asked for a password): $ sudo make install

At this point, the installation should be complete, although you will probably have to login again before all changes take place. If the installation is successful, you should find executables installed and an update to shell variables (only AFTER logging in again). To verify update of your environment: $ echo $PATH # should now have the path to your installed ngs-tools, and $ which sra-search # should return the location of this utility.