# Quick note on configuring tip colouring in auspice

**URL:** <https://nextstrain.discourse.group/t/quick-note-on-configuring-tip-colouring-in-auspice/919>\
**Category:** General\
**Created:** [January 6, 2022, 6:53pm UTC](https://nextstrain.discourse.group/t/quick-note-on-configuring-tip-colouring-in-auspice/919 "2022-01-06T18:53:51Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![pvanheus](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex031/user_avatar/nextstrain.discourse.group/pvanheus/32/305_2.png) [@pvanheus](https://nextstrain.discourse.group/u/pvanheus)\
**Post date:** [January 6, 2022, 6:53pm UTC](https://nextstrain.discourse.group/t/quick-note-on-configuring-tip-colouring-in-auspice/919/1 "2022-01-06T18:53:51Z")

</div>

While [this discussion](https://nextstrain.discourse.group/t/valid-auspice-config-metadata/88/3) covers a lot about colouring and defaults in Auspice, I’ll venture a few more observations based on reading the code and experimenting.

As described in the [View Settings](https://docs.nextstrain.org/projects/auspice/en/latest/advanced-functionality/view-settings.html), [`color_by`](https://github.com/nextstrain/ncov/blob/master/my_profiles/example/my_auspice_config.json#L79) in the `auspice_config` sets the key to use for colouring tips. The possible values are: almost anything mentioned in the colorings config of `auspice_confg` and also a few other things provided by default, most notably `clade_membership` (Clade), `gt` (Genotype) and `num_date` (Sampling Date).

(I say “almost anything” because in my config it seems that `gisaid_epi_isl` and `genbank_accession` are present in the list of colorings in the `auspice_config` but they are not selectable as colourings in the web interface)

Finally here is the list of keys my current build exposes:

```auto
clade_membership
num_date
gt
location
division
country
region
host
age
sex
author
originating_lab
submitting_lab
recency
recency
S1_mutations
mutational_fitness
logistic_growth
emerging_lineage
current_frequency
epiweek

```