common-workflow-language/common-workflow-language resource

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1480 stars · 193 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

The Common Workflow Language (CWL) is an open standard for describing command line tools and data analysis workflows in a portable, vendor-neutral way. This repository hosts the CWL v1.0.x specification and serves as the home for the CWL standards project.

Use cases

• describe portable command line tool workflows
• run reproducible bioinformatics pipelines on HPC clusters
• share scientific data analysis workflows across platforms
• scale analysis workflows from laptop to cloud
• standardize multi-step data analysis pipelines
• make workflows portable across workflow engines

When to choose

• you need vendor-neutral, portable workflow descriptions for data-intensive science
• you want reproducible pipelines that run on workstations, clusters, cloud, and HPC
• you work in bioinformatics, medical imaging, physics, or similar fields
• you want an open standard backed by a multi-vendor community

When to avoid

• you need a workflow execution engine rather than a specification (use a CWL implementation like cwltool)
• your workflows are purely web-based or event-driven rather than command-line tool based
• you prefer a single-vendor workflow system with richer ecosystem features

Facets

learning-resource · maturity stable

workflow-automation developer-tools documentation data-science bioinformatics developer-tools cloud-computing cross-platform cloud cli workflow-language open-standard scientific-workflows reproducibility hpc portable-pipelines specification automation docker

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="common-workflow-language/common-workflow-language")