Summary¶

Congratulations on completing the Hello Plugins training.

What you learned¶

If you completed Parts 1-2, you now know how to discover, configure, and use existing plugins to extend your Nextflow pipelines. This knowledge will help you leverage the growing ecosystem of community plugins.

If you completed Parts 3-7, you've also learned how to create your own plugins, implementing custom functions, trace observers, and more. Plugin development opens up powerful possibilities for:

Sharing reusable functions across your organization
Integrating with external services and APIs
Custom monitoring and reporting
Supporting new execution platforms

Plugin development checklist¶

Java 21+ installed
Create project with nextflow plugin create <name> <org>
Implement extension class with @Function methods
Optionally add TraceObserver implementations for workflow events
Write unit tests
Build with make assemble
Install with make install
Enable in nextflow.config with plugins { id 'plugin-id' }
Import functions with include { fn } from 'plugin/plugin-id'

Key code patterns¶

Function definition:

@Function
String myFunction(String input, String optional = 'default') {
    return input.transform()
}

Plugin configuration:

nextflowPlugin {
    provider = 'my-org'
    className = 'my.org.MyPlugin'
    extensionPoints = ['my.org.MyExtension']
}

Using in workflows:

include { myFunction } from 'plugin/my-plugin'

workflow {
    channel.of('a', 'b', 'c')
        .map { item -> myFunction(item) }
        .view()
}

Extension point summary¶

Type	Annotation	Purpose
Function	`@Function`	Callable from workflows

Additional resources¶

Official documentation:

Using plugins: comprehensive guide to installing and configuring plugins
Developing plugins: detailed plugin development reference

Plugin discovery:

Nextflow Plugin Registry: browse and discover available plugins
Plugin registry docs: registry documentation

Examples and references:

nf-hello: simple example plugin (great starting point)
Nextflow plugins repository: collection of official plugins for reference

Whether you're using existing plugins or building your own, you now have the tools to extend Nextflow beyond its core capabilities.