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