A workflow management language extension for GNU Guix

The Guix Workflow Language (GWL) provides a scientific computing extension to GNU Guix's declarative language for package management for the declaration of scientific workflows.

It combines the specification of work units and their relationship to one another with the reproducible software deployment facilities of the functional package manager GNU Guix. A GWL workflow will always run in a reproducible environment that GNU Guix automatically prepares. The GWL extends your Guix installation with a single new sub-command: guix workflow .

In the GWL there are two concepts we need to know about: processes and workflows. We describe a computation (running a program, or evaluating a Scheme expression) using a process. A workflow describes how individual processes relate to each other (e.g. process B must run after process A, and process C must run before process A).

GWL workflows are executable code. The workflow language is embedded in the powerful general purpose language Guile Scheme, so you can compute arbitrarily complex process and workflow definitions. The GWL supports a classic Lisp syntax as well as a Python-like syntax called Wisp.