Nextflow Dev Container Feature

This repo contains a dev container Feature for adding Nextflow to a devcontainer.

nextflow

The nextflow binary should be available inside the built container.

{
    "image": "mcr.microsoft.com/devcontainers/base:ubuntu",
    "features": {
        "ghcr.io/alvaromartmart/devcontainer-nextflow-feature/nextflow:1": {}
    }
}

nextflow -v

Development

Repo and Feature Structure

Similar to the devcontainers/features repo, this repository has a src folder. Each Feature has its own sub-folder, containing at least a devcontainer-feature.json and an entrypoint script install.sh.

├── src
│   ├── nextflow
│   │   ├── devcontainer-feature.json
│   │   └── install.sh
|   ├── ...
│   │   ├── devcontainer-feature.json
│   │   └── install.sh
...

An implementing tool will composite the documented dev container properties from the feature's devcontainer-feature.json file, and execute in the install.sh entrypoint script in the container during build time. Implementing tools are also free to process attributes under the customizations property as desired.

Distributing Features

Versioning

Features are individually versioned by the version attribute in a Feature's devcontainer-feature.json. Features are versioned according to the semver specification. More details can be found in the dev container Feature specification.

Publishing

NOTE: The Distribution spec can be found here.

While any registry implementing the OCI Distribution spec can be used, this template will leverage GHCR (GitHub Container Registry) as the backing registry.

Features are meant to be easily sharable units of dev container configuration and installation code.

This repo contains a GitHub Action workflow that will publish each feature to GHCR. By default, each Feature will be prefixed with the <owner/<repo> namespace. For example, the two Features in this repository can be referenced in a devcontainer.json with:

ghcr.io/alvaromartmart/devcontainer-nextflow-feature/nextflow:1

The provided GitHub Action will also publish a third "metadata" package with just the namespace, eg: ghcr.io/alvaromartmart/devcontainer-nextflow-feature. This contains information useful for tools aiding in Feature discovery.

'devcontainers/feature-starter' is known as the feature collection namespace.