# ncbi/sra-tools

SRA Tools

Repository: https://github.com/ncbi/sra-tools
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/sra-tools
Language: C
License: NOASSERTION
License Family: other
Last push: 2026-08-26T00:06:56+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 77/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 99, release rhythm 35, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 4395, "days_push": 8, "days_rel": null, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 0}
- flags: no_releases, no_license
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 1362, forks 278 (observed 2026-08-28T04:04:30.243951+00:00)

## What it is
The NCBI SRA Toolkit is a collection of command-line tools and libraries for accessing, converting, and downloading data from the INSDC Sequence Read Archive. It includes utilities like fasterq-dump and prefetch for retrieving sequencing reads into standard formats.

## Use cases
- download sequencing reads from SRA
- convert SRA files to FASTQ
- fetch SRA run data for bioinformatics analysis
- access NCBI Sequence Read Archive programmatically
- extract reads from SRA archives into FASTA

## When to choose
- you need to download or convert data from NCBI's Sequence Read Archive
- you're building genomics pipelines that consume public sequencing data
- you want the official, maintained NCBI tooling for SRA access

## When to avoid
- you need to upload data to SRA via cloud pipelines (consider other NCBI submission tools)
- you want a high-level genomics library rather than data access utilities
- you need a permissively licensed library - the license is a custom public-domain-style notice

## Facets
- artifact type: cli-tool
- maturity: active
- function: cli, sdk, file-system, developer-tools
- domain: bioinformatics
- platform: windows, cpp, python
- tags: genomics, sequencing-data, fasterq-dump, prefetch, ncbi, sequence-read-archive, data-engineering, command-line, linux, macos

## Member repositories
- ncbi/sra-tools (main) score 77

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:04:30.243951+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T04:41:31.453531+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/ncbi/sra-tools (fetched 2026-08-28T04:04:30.243951+00:00, sha 2eb8637684e9)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.