What is nf-core?
nf-core is a global community collaborating to build open-source Nextflow components and pipelines.
nf-core provides a standardised set of best practices, guidelines, and templates for building and sharing bioinformatics pipelines. These pipelines are designed to be modular, scalable, and portable, allowing researchers to easily adapt and execute them using their own data and compute resources.
Key nf-core benefits include its open development, testing, and peer review, ensuring that the pipelines are robust, well-documented, and validated against real-world datasets. This helps to increase the reliability and reproducibility of bioinformatics analyses and ultimately enables researchers to accelerate their scientific discoveries.
All nf-core code is community owned.
Everyone is welcome to use, contribute to, and help maintain nf-core.
Key Features of nf-core pipelines
Documentation
nf-core pipelines have extensive documentation covering installation, usage, and description of output files to ensure that you won’t be left in the dark.
CI testing
Every time a change is made to the pipeline code, nf-core pipelines use continuous-integration testing to ensure that nothing has broken.
Stable releases
nf-core pipelines use GitHub releases to tag stable versions of the code and software, making pipeline runs totally reproducible.
Packaged software
Pipeline dependencies are automatically downloaded and handled using Docker, Singularity, Conda, or other software management tools. There is no need for any software installations.
Portable and reproducible
nf-core pipelines follow best practices to ensure maximum portability and reproducibility. The large community makes the pipelines exceptionally well-tested and easy to execute.
Cloud-ready
nf-core pipelines are tested on AWS after every major release. You can even browse results live on the website and use outputs for your own benchmarking.
nf-core is published in Nature Biotechnology: Nat Biotechnol 38, 276–278 (2020). Nature Biotechnology.