In this tutorial, we will demonstrate how to create and launch a Nextflow pipeline using the ICA command line interface (CLI).
Please refer to for installing ICA CLI. To authenticate, please follow the steps in the page.
Tutorial project
In this tutorial, we will create pipeline in ICA which includes four processes:
We will also upload a Docker container to the ICA Docker repository for use within the pipeline.
The 'main.nf' file defines the pipeline that orchestrates various RNASeq analysis processes.
The script uses the following tools:
Salmon: Software tool for quantification of transcript abundance from RNA-seq data.
FastQC: QC tool for sequencing data
MultiQC: Tool to aggregate and summarize QC reports
We need a Docker container containing these tools. For the sake of this tutorial, we will use the container from the original tutorial. You can refer to the section to build your own docker image with the required tools.
Docker image upload
With in your computer, download the image required for this project using the following command.
docker pull nextflow/rnaseq-nf
Create a tarball of the image to upload to ICA.
Following are lists of commands that you can use to upload the tarball to your project.
Add the image to the ICA Docker repository
The uploaded image can be added to the ICA docker repository from the ICA Graphical User Interface (GUI).
Change the format for the image tarball to DOCKER:
Navigate to Projects > your_project > Data.
Check the checkbox for the uploaded tarball.
Click on Manage > Change format.
To add this image to the ICA Docker repository, first click on Projects to go back to the home page.
From the ICA home page, click on the System Settings > Docker Repository > Create > Image.
This will open a new window that lets you select the region (US, EU, CA) in which your your project is and the docker image from the bottom pane.
Edit the Name field to rename it. For this tutorial, we will change the name to "rnaseq". Select the region, and give it a version number, and description. Click on "Save".
After creating a new docker image, you can click on the image to get the container URL (under Regions) for the nextflow configuration file.
Nextflow configuration file
Create a configuration file called "nextflow.config" in the same folder as the main.nf file above. Use the URL copied above to add the process.container line in the config file.
You can add a pod directive within a process or in the config file to specify a compute type. The following is an example of a configuration file with the 'standard-small' compute type for all processes. Please refer to the page for a list of available compute types.
Parameters file
The parameters file defines the pipeline input parameters. Refer to the or input for detailed information for creating correctly formatted parameters files.
An empty form looks as follows:
The input files are specified within a single dataInputs node with individual input file specified in a separate dataInput node. Settings (as opposed to files) are specified within the steps node. Settings represent any non-file input to the pipeline, including but not limited to, strings, booleans, integers, etc..
For this tutorial, we do not have any settings parameters but it requires multiple file inputs. The parameters.xml file looks as follows:
Use the following commands to create the pipeline with the above contents in your project.
If not already in the project context, enter it by using the following command:
icav2 enter <PROJECT NAME or ID>
Create pipeline using icav2 project pipelines create nextflow Example:
If you prefer to organize the processes in different folders/files, you can use --other parameter to upload the different processes as additional files. Example:
You can refer to page to explore options to automate this process.
Refer to for details on running the pipeline from CLI.
Example command to run the pipeline from CLI:
You can get the pipeline id under "ID" column by running the following command:
You can get the file ids under "ID" column by running the following commands:
Please refer to command help (icav2 [command] --help) to determine available flags to filter output of above commands if necessary. You can also refer to page for available flags for the icav2 commands.
For more help on uploading data to ICA, please refer to the page.