Scheduled Maintenance – 3–5 November 2026
Due to scheduled infrastructure maintenance, Ensembl Archive sites will have significantly reduced capacity and availability from 3 to 5 November.
Ensembl Tools will be unavailable throughout this period, and no jobs can be processed.
We apologise for the inconvenience.

Site structure

The site structure that we are going to build is self-contained within a server-root directory. It doesn't matter where this server-root directory is situated on your system; as long as the files within it are located as described here then everything should work OK.

The site structure is as follows (using "/usr/local/ensembl" as an example server-root):

`-- /usr/local/ensembl
    |-- apache2 Apache web server (default installation location)
|-- bioperl-live bio-modelling tools that Ensembl is based upon
|-- ensembl Ensembl core module
|-- ensembl-compara Code for handling cross-species comparisons
|-- ensembl-funcgen Code to access the functional genomics data
|-- ensembl-io File parsing and writing utilities
|-- ensembl-orm Interface to non-genomic databases
|-- ensembl-tools API scripts used by online tools such as the VEP
|-- ensembl-variation Code to access the variation (SNP) data
|-- ensembl-webcode Code to create an Ensembl website
\-- public-plugins Public plugin modules

Next: Installing the code components →