Installation of wwwblast requires an existing web server installation such as Apache. It also requires that users, themselves or through arrangement with their system administrator, have access to the '/htdocs/' directory under the existing web server installation.
To install, we first need to change the working directory to /htdocs/ and download the appropriate wwwblast archive for the platform to this directory. We then need to inflate the archive and extract the resulting tar ball. For example, we can use the following lines of command to install the 32-bit wwwblast package for Linux:
gunzip -d wwwblast-2.2.14-ia32-linux.tar.gz
tar -xvpf wwwblast-2.2.14-ia32-linux.tar
If newer version of tar is available, the above commands can be consolidated into a single command:
tar zxvpf wwwblast-2.2.14-ia32-linux.tar.gz
Please note that the 'p' switch is significant here - it preserves the file access settings stored in the distribution. The temporary directory for BLAST overview images (TmpGifs) should have a permission setting of 777, and logfiles (wwwblast.log and psiblast.log) should have a permission setting of 666.
A successful installation will result in a new subdirectory called blast.