Using plugins

Ensembl sites use a modular architecture allowing features to be added, modified or overwritten by including additional plugins. The default setup.ini file includes three plugins in the [REPOSITORIES] stanza and easy mirror makes it straightforward to include additional plugins from the Ensembl public-plugins or any other suitable git repository. To add/customise features, changing or including additional plugins in the [REPOSITORIES] stanza will ensure that the latest version (of the specified branch) is loaded each time you run Step 4.1: Update Ensembl webcode.

Each plugin that is loaded has the potential to override parts of the plugins that were loaded before so the Ensembl public-plugins/mirror plugin is the last to be loaded. This is where configuration settings such as which species to include and database connection details are stored by easy mirror and can be directly edited to make changes between running Step 4.1 and Step 4.2. However local changes will be overwritten every time you run Step 4.1 so it is best to make persistent changes to your Ensembl instance by Creating a plugin of your own.