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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 http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jhclark/downloads/ducttape-0.3.tgz
tar -xvzf ducttape-0.3.tgz

Add ducttape to your PATH:

export PATH=$PWD/ducttape-0.3:$PATH

Run a tutorial example:

cd ducttape-0.3/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 http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jhclark/downloads/ducttape-0.3.tgz
tar -xvzf ducttape-0.3.tgz
cd ducttape 0.3
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

To keep updated on the latest versions of ducttape, subscribe to our low-traffic announcement mailing list: https://groups.google.com/group/ducttape-announce

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".

To stay in the loop on ducttape development, subscribe to our higher traffic development mailing list: https://groups.google.com/group/ducttape-dev

To keep updated on bleeding edge development of ducttape, subscribe to our higher traffic commits mailing list: https://groups.google.com/group/ducttape-commits

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

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)