Nextflow

Nextflow is an open-source workflow system and language for data-driven computational pipelines, developed by Seqera. It is based on the dataflow programming model and runs the same pipeline on a local machine, HPC schedulers, or cloud batch and Kubernetes platforms. The latest GitHub release listed is v26.10.0.

What It Is

Nextflow lets researchers and engineers compose pipelines from existing scripts and tools without learning a new language or API for each task. Parallelism is defined implicitly by process input and output declarations, so pipelines can scale up or out without being adapted to a specific platform. It extends the Unix pipes model with a fluent DSL built on functional composition.

Reproducibility and portability

Nextflow supports container technologies such as Docker, Podman and Singularity, and other dependency managers including Conda and Spack. Combined with GitHub integration, this lets pipelines be versioned and earlier configurations be reproduced. Intermediate results are tracked automatically, so execution can resume from the last successful step. An abstraction layer separates pipeline logic from execution. Executors cover GridEngine, SLURM, LSF, PBS, Moab, HTCondor, Kubernetes, AWS Batch, Azure Batch and Google Cloud Batch.

Setup path and ecosystem

Nextflow requires Java 17 or later. It installs with a single curl command, which creates a nextflow executable, or through Bioconda. The ecosystem includes the nf-core community pipelines, a plugin registry, Seqera-hosted pipeline and container catalogs, an official Visual Studio Code extension, and the Seqera AI assistant. Documentation, a training portal, a community forum and Slack support learning.

Current Status

The homepage states that Nextflow.io is not changing and that Seqera's new product, Nextflow Frontier, is built on Nextflow. The software is released under the Apache 2.0 license.