See documentation

MaxQuant is a quantitative proteomics software package that unfortunatly only runs on Windows and is designed for use with a graphical user interface. Both make it hard to integrate into a larger workflow.

mqrun consists of three parts, that try to mitigate those problems:

mqrun.mqparams

This is a small library that converts user supplied json-parameter files into the rather peculiar configuration files of MaxQuant and supplies a small helper function that calles the MaxQuant executable with this configuration. The format of the parameter file is documented in mqrun.mqparams. Since the format of the MaxQuant configuration file keeps changing, mqparams supports one version of MaxQuant only.

mqrun.fscall

fscall is a library that handles requests to another machine, where the filesystem is the only communication channel. It handles status messages, simple error handling, access to logfiles and a heartbeat that tells the client that the server is still working on a request.

mqrun.mqdaemon

mqdaemon uses fscall to provide a server that can run on a Windows machine and handles requests for MaxQuant. It includes basic load balancing. See mqdaemon -h for options.

mqdaemon is compatible with >= python3.3 and needs MaxQuant 1.5.0.0

The code for the client runs fine on python2.7.

Open a terminal as root and execute

pip install mqrun

TODO: Test and check security

Suppose we have two machines in a network, win_host and linux_host running Windows and Linux respectively, and we want to run MaxQuant on win_host, but control it from linux_host. First, we need a shared directory.

You can skip this step if you already have a share between win_host and linux_host.

Edit /etc/samba/smb.conf and add a share for /mnt/win_share along the lines of this:

[win_share]
comment = Share for MaxQuant
path = /mnt/win_share
valid users = linux_user
writeable = yes
public = no

Create a directory for the requests

cd /mnt/win_share
mkdir requests

Then add a Samba user

sudo smbpasswd -a linux_user

and choose a password linux_user_passwd.

After restarting smbd with service smbd restart or systemctl restart smbd mount the Samba share on the windows machine with Add network drive (TODO?) and the credentials linux_user and linux_user_passwd. It should now be possible to exchange files between win_host and linux_host.

Open a command line on win_host and start mqdaemon:

Z:
mqdaemon --mqpath C:\\path\to\MaxQuantDir --logfile maxquant.log requests

You can check other options with

mqdaemon -h

The logfile should contain the line INFO:root:start to listen in directory Z:\\requests, without any errors after that. The daemon is now running and waits for requests until stopped by SIGTERM (finish all running tasks) or SIGINT (abort tasks and set to FAILED) (TODO: not properly implemented). It should be safe to start a new instance after a few seconds in both cases.

Users who want to run MaxQuant need to have write permission in /mnt/win_share/requests, but should not have the right to list the contents of that directory (execute and read bit not set), or they can access the data of different users. mqclient will create directory names inside requests, that are hard to guess (TODO check this!!) to protect the data from unpriviliged access.

Run MaxQuant like this:

import mqclient
import time
import json

# specify the parameters for MaxQuant
params = {    # TODO how about something sensible ;-)
    # each elemet corresponds to a "parameter group" in MaxQuant
    "rawFiles": [
        {
            "files": [
                {
                    "name": "input1",
                    "fraction": 1
                }
            ],
            "params": {
                "defaults": "default",
                "variableModifications": [
                    "Oxidation (M)",
                ]
            }
        }
    ],
    "fastaFiles": {
        "fileNames": ["fasta1"],
        "firstSearch": [],
    }
    "globalParams": {
        "defaults": "default",
        "matchBetweenRuns": True
    }
}

with open("path/to/params.json", 'w') as f:
    json.dump(params, f)

# paths to the input and parameter files
file_paths = [
    "path/to/fasta1.fasta",
    "path/to/input1.raw",
    "path/to/params.json",
}

# Run MaxQuant (future is similar to concurrent.futures.Future)
future = fscall.submit(
    "/mnt/win_share/requests", file_paths
)
try:
    while not future.done():
        print(result.status)
        time.sleep(1)
    result = future.result()
except ValueError:
    print("Invalid parameters")
except TimeoutError:
    print("Too much workload on win_host or connection lost")
except Exception:
    print("Something else went wrong")
else:
    print(result.outfiles)
    print(result.log)