Snaketool and Nektool
Snaketool and Nektool are frameworks for building command line tools using the Snakemake or Nextflow workflow managers
Writing reliable command line tools requires a lot of boilerplate to ensure input and generated files are valid, catch errors with subprocesses, log stderr messages etc. It’s very time-consuming and annoying.
Snakemake does a lot of heavy lifting in this regard and is an obvious alternative to a command line tool. While Snakemake pipelines are excellent, cloning a pipeline repo every time you want to run an analysis is also annoying. So too is manually punching in the full path to a Snakefile somewhere on your system, as well as copying and manually updating the config file for your analysis. Building a Snakemake pipeline with a convenience launcher offers the best of both worlds:
- Developing command line applications is quicker and easier
- Installing, running, and rerunning is easier and more convenient
- You can have subcommands for utility scripts and Snakefiles
- You can trick NextFlow users into running Snakemake and vice versa
- Your pipelines have help messages!