Hosting IGV web on a server I have my analysis on a cloud server. The data is quite large, so copying it locally is not really an option. I want to be able to host IGV as a server on that server, so that it can access those files.

I installed IGV web (https://github.com/igvteam/igv-webapp) on my server, and ran it, but the Tracks → Local File option opens a file browser on my local machine, it doesn't let me select files on the server.

Is there any easy way to host IGV web on a cloud server?
You can use X11 forwarding to run IGV on the headless server where the data is located and simply forward the GUI to your client machine using the X11 protocol. This is a solution I use consistently for my research when working with 20+ tracks that I want to keep on the server.


Download and install IGV for linux from the IGV site on to your server. 
Connect to the server using ssh with X11 forwarding enabled

ssh -X user@server
Navigate to the recently downloaded and unzipped IGV folder. Execute the igv.sh script.

./igv.sh


The script launches the IGV session with 4gb of memory. Edit the script to launch with more, 32gb in this edited excerpt.

exec java -showversion --module-path="${prefix}/lib" -Xmx32g \
@"${prefix}/igv.args" \
-Dapple.laf.useScreenMenuBar=true \
-Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true \
--module=org.igv/org.broad.igv.ui.Main "$@"