Introduction

Ducttape is a workflow management system for researchers who heart unix. It allows you to:

• Write tasks using bash and have dependencies among tasks automatically managed (like Make)
• Track the versions of the software used, the data used, and even the task descriptions themselves in a very detailed way
• Quickly and easily run your workflow under multiple input conditions while re-using intermediate results -- without copy-pasting

Want to learn how to use Ducttape? Read TUTORIAL.md.

Want to help develop ducttape? Read HACKING.md.

Quick Start

First, download and unpack the program:

wget https://github.com/CoderPat/ducttape/releases/download/v0.5/ducttape-0.5.0.tgz
tar -xvzf ducttape-0.5.0.tgz

Add ducttape to your PATH:

export PATH=$PWD/ducttape-0.5.0:$PATH

Run a tutorial example:

cd ducttape-0.5.0/tutorial
ducttape 01-01-hello-world.tape

Or, if you're coming from machine translation, try building the entire cdec tutorial in a single command (see http://www.cdec-decoder.org/guide/tutorial.html):

wget www.cs.cmu.edu/~jhclark/cdec_tutorial.tar.gz
cd cdec_tutorial/
# Run 2 jobs at a time
ducttape tutorial.tape -C tutorial.tconf -j2
# Now view a summary table of the results! (All 1 of them)
ducttape tutorial.tape -C tutorial.tconf summary scores

What's next? Read TUTORIAL.md.

System-wide Installation

wget https://github.com/CoderPat/ducttape/releases/download/v0.5/ducttape-0.5.0.tgz
tar -xvzf ducttape-0.5.0tgz
cd ducttape-0.5.0
sudo make install

Design Principles

• Simple things should remain simple.

• You should be able to start simple. Run. Add complexity. And re-run.

• Workflow management and data flows have very different design patterns than other sorts of code. Writing them in C++, Java, or XML is annoying.

Updates

We are still formalizing a way to disseminate updates to ducttape. Stay tuned!

If you have questions about how to use ducttape, please post on StackOverflow using the tag "ducttape": http://stackoverflow.com/questions/ask?tags=ducttape. If you'd like to help other ducttape users or keep up with questions being asked about ducttape, please use http://stackexchange.com/filters/new to create a daily email subscription to StackExchange questions with the tag "ducttape".

Emacs Mode

To get syntax highlighting in emacs, add a line similar to the following in your ~/.emacs file:

(load "$PATH_TO_DUCTTAPE_HERE/tool-support/emacs/ducttape.el")

Vim Mode

To get syntax highlighting in vim, copy (or symlink) the ducttape's vim syntax highlighting file, like so:

mkdir -p ~/.vim/syntax
cp $PATH_TO_DUCTTAPE_HERE/tool-support/vim/ducttape.vim ~/.vim/syntax/ducctape.vim

Then add a line to your ~/.vimrc to create an association with .tape files:

syntax on
filetype on
au BufRead,BufNewFile *.tape set filetype=ducttape

VSCode Mode

If you use Visual Studio Code, there is also an extension for ducttape on the store that provides syntax highlighting

You can also instal it manually. Check the instructions in tool-support/vscode.

NOTE: The grammar for the extension is still incomplete.

Related Projects

Minimal Web UI for ducttape: https://github.com/vchahun/ducttape-web

Better Vim Mode: https://github.com/vchahun/vim-ducttape (This will either replace or be merged with the current vim files)