Hello all,

I am facing a problem where bowtie2 can't recognize its indices when ran through Snakemake. When I try the bash command in terminal it works fine.The indices were downloaded from Bowtie2 website. (I am not sure its a problem with the indices because it works fine when I am running it through the terminal). The error I am getting is:

perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
LANGUAGE = (unset),
LC_ALL = (unset),
LANG = "en_US.UTF-8"
are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
(ERR): "../resources/BOWTIE/bowtie" does not exist or is not a Bowtie 2 index
Exiting now ...

And Snakemake code is (sorry for the messed up indentation but the indentation is correct from myside):

import os
import glob

configfile: "../config/config.yaml"

Sample,Read = glob_wildcards("data/{sample}_{read}.fastq.gz")

print(Sample)
rule all:
   input:

       expand("{sample}/bowtie2/unfiltered_aligned.{extension}", sample=Sample, extension=["sam","txt"])
 rule bowtie2:
       input:
           r1 = "data/{sample}_R1.fastq.gz",
           r2 = "data/{sample}_R2.fastq.gz"

        output:
           aligned_sam="{sample}/bowtie2/unfiltered_aligned.sam"
         log:
           "{sample}/bowtie2/unfiltered_aligned.txt"
        threads: 8
        params:
            index = config["ref"]["index"]
        container:
            "docker://biocontainers/bowtie2:v2.4.1_cv1"

        shell:
             """
              bowtie2 --local --no-mixed --no-discordant -p {threads} -x {params.index} -1 {input.r1} -2 {input.r2} -S {output.aligned_sam}  
              &> {log}
              """

and here is the tree structure of the directory

Config file:

ref:
    species: homo_sapiens
    build: "HG38"
    index: "../resources/BOWTIE/bowtie"