Episode 35: Nextflow plugins - A plugin development walkthrough

This podcast episode is quite different to normal. Rather than an interview or a discussion, you'll get to watch as Ben Sherman guides Phil Ewels through the process of creating a new Nextflow Plugin from scratch. Right from the first line of code to creating a release and publishing the plugin.

Nextflow plugins have been getting more attention lately and we've been getting a lot of questions in the community. There is better documentation and resources planned, but in the mean time we hope that this can be a useful guide for anyone curious in how they work, and interested in getting started.

After this we will be back to our usual routine in the podcast, but we'd love to hear what you thought of this taster!


00:00:00 Welcome
00:03:27 Nextflow docs
00:08:34 Starting by forking nf-hello
00:10:32 Overview of project files
00:17:13 Trying a first compile
00:18:12 Different publishing methods
00:19:54 nf-boost local publish method
00:23:05 Trying the new compile
00:24:00 Running locally with the plugin
00:27:32 Looking at the nf-hello plugin code
00:39:29 Deleting files we don't need
00:42:34 Finding event names in the Nextflow source
00:47:46 Writing some custom functions
00:49:41 Testing our new code
00:51:51 Modifying the test pipeline to create files
00:54:14 Coding up the JSON output
00:59:20 Looking at nf-prov code for BCO files
01:05:30 Testing JSON output
01:09:39 Automatic work dir cleanup / nf-boost
01:12:17 Publishing a release on GitHub
01:19:07 Custom plugin repositories
01:26:47 Publishing for all Nextflow users
01:29:52 Conclusion and end