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Where Can I Get The Asperasoft Command Line Client Ascp

I need to upload several terabytes of files to SRA. I read about something called "ascp" that works with the Aspera server NCBI uses but I can't seem to download this software without a user/pass.

Does anyone have this software?

sra aspera
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updated by GenoMax GenoMax • written by Jeremy Leipzig Jeremy Leipzig

Hello. I installed Aspera Connect 2.8.2 in Windows 7. Then I used the following command to upload data, but I got an error. Please help, thank you.

C:\Users\dell\Aspera\Aspera Connect\bin>    ascp -i aspera.openssh -QT -l100m -k1 -d my.file1.fq.gz subasp@upload.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov:uploads/leila_TFgf7FSD

ascp: failed to open ssh session., exiting session stop.

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updated by GenoMax GenoMax • written by leila • leila

4 answers

I had this same issue (and asked myself why anyone would use this over rsync), and then found the answer. It is extremely non-intuitive, but you must download the Aspera Connect browser plugin, and the CLI utility ascp is included in that package. If you still have issues, I have it in my Dropbox.

Update: Aspera now maintains this shell script as a separate file. You should now be able to do 

sh <(curl -s http://demo.asperasoft.com/ascp-install-3.5.4.102989-linux-64.sh)
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updated by Ram Ram • written by Matt Shirley Matt Shirley

The Aspera support responded to the Biostar information request email directly so I am forwarding it here

To Use Aspera. Navigate to http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sra/ and click on 'Download' (left column). You will get a page with a link to Aspera being available at Aspera Connect under the download tab (if it isn't already installed).

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written by Istvan Albert Istvan Albert

what a crappy answer. man they suck.

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written by Jeremy Leipzig Jeremy Leipzig

well just consider the act of mandating the use a weird third party commercial package that is likely to not exist in five years ... the reason being that people can download humongous data via a browser? ... that's just painful to even think it through

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written by Istvan Albert Istvan Albert

If the needs are really for an easier to use system to reliably checksum and resume downloads of large files, someone needs to tell them that the BitTorrent protocol has legitimate uses.

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written by Matt Shirley Matt Shirley

I don't even think they have a Linux client that is up to date with the Windows/Mac version, so I wasn't even able to use it on SRA when I last tried!

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written by Torst Torst

I don't usually indulge in thread necromancy, but I couldn't help noticing as I read this comment that it's now been 5.4 years since it was made; and we're still stuck with ascp. But hey, the browser plugin installer apparently hasn't been updated since then, so at least we can say some of the pessimism is/was warranted.

To make this a slightly-less-useless comment, I'll note that bare CLIs are available at ososa's link below for all platforms, not just Windows, and the version numbers there are higher than on the browser plugin, if that means anything. It still installs into the boneheaded hardcoded $HOME/.aspera directory, though.

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written by jenn.drummond jenn.drummond

the ascp binary will be installed in $ASPERA_ROOT/connect/bin/(/home/.aspera/connect/bin for linux) when you install aspera connect plugin.

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written by ewre ewre

I recently used the ascp method for my SRA upload. I downloaded the aspera CLI for Windows from here: https://developer.asperasoft.com/desktop-advance/command-line-client

The ascp executable is under /cli/bin/

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written by ososa • ososa

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