Welcome to Snakemake’s documentation!

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Snakemake is an MIT-licensed workflow management system that aims to reduce the complexity of creating workflows by providing a fast and comfortable execution environment, together with a clean and modern specification language in python style. Snakemake workflows are essentially Python scripts extended by declarative code to define rules. Rules describe how to create output files from input files.

Quick Example

rule targets:
    input:
        "plots/dataset1.pdf",
        "plots/dataset2.pdf"

rule plot:
    input:
        "raw/{dataset}.csv"
    output:
        "plots/{dataset}.pdf"
    shell:
        "somecommand {input} {output}"
  • Similar to GNU Make, you specify targets in terms of a pseudo-rule at the top.
  • For each target and intermediate file, you create rules that define how they are created from input files.
  • Snakemake determines the rule dependencies by matching file names.
  • Input and output files can contain multiple named wildcards.
  • Rules can either use shell commands, plain Python code or external Python or R scripts to create output files from input files.
  • Snakemake workflows can be easily executed on workstations, clusters and in the cloud without modification. The job scheduling can be constrained by arbitrary resources like e.g. available CPU cores, memory or GPUs.
  • Snakemake can use Amazon S3, Google Storage, Dropbox, FTP, WebDAV and SFTP to access input or output files and further access input files via HTTP and HTTPS.

Getting started

To get started, consider the Snakemake Tutorial, the introductory slides, and the FAQ.

Support

Publications using Snakemake

In the following you find an incomplete list of publications making use of Snakemake for their analyses. Please consider to add your own.