In this News and Views episode, Phil Ewels, Chris Hakkaart, and Marcel Ribeiro-Dantas discuss the hottest topics in the Nextflow world.

nf-test

• nf-test is a simple test framework for Nextflow pipelines.
  • Developed by Lukas Forer, Sebastian Schönher, and others.
• nf-test has a range of functions that can be used to test a pipeline to ensure it is being run correctly.
  • Documentation can be found here.
• Edmund Miller recently presented a ByteSize talk discussing nf-test.
• nf-test is being incorporated into some nf-core pipelines and will likely be incorporated into all nf-core pipelines in the future.

Nextflow and nf-core mentorship program

• Nextflow and nf-core runs a mentorship program that is supported by our Chan Zuckerberg Initiative grant.
• Round 1 of the program was a great success.
  • Check out the blog post to see what our mentor/mentee paris did.
• Round 2 of the mentorship program started in December 2022 and will finish in March 2023.
• Participation jumped from 5 pairs last round to 13 pairs made up of mentors and mentees from around the globe.
• Keep an eye out for updates and the next round starting in the middle of next year.

Debugging resume

• Abhinav Sharma wrote a fantastic blog post about caching behavior.
• Using a hands-on approach he highlights some strategies that can be used to understand what is causing a particular process (or processes) to re-run, instead of using the cache from previous runs of the pipeline.
• A great example of a community post that is addressing a common question we see in the Slack channels.