Install nextflow with Homebrew, Nix

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• nextflow

Project history

Nextflow was created by Paolo Di Tommaso and collaborators in the computational biology community, then formalized in the 2017 Nature Biotechnology correspondence 'Nextflow enables reproducible computational workflows'. The GitHub README positions it around parallel and distributed pipelines, software dependency isolation, and moving the same pipeline across execution backends.

The project later became closely associated with Seqera and nf-core. nf-core, started in 2018, gave Nextflow a high-quality shared pipeline ecosystem with standards, templates, modules, subworkflows, CI, and community governance. That ecosystem changed Nextflow from a workflow engine into a de facto collaboration format for many bioinformatics groups.

Adoption history

Nextflow adoption is strongest in bioinformatics, genomics, and research computing, where users need to rerun pipelines across laptops, clusters, and cloud batches without rewriting orchestration. The 2017 Nature Biotechnology article has thousands of citations, and nf-core's 2025 Genome Biology writeup reported 124 pipelines, over 1,400 modules, around 80 subworkflows, 2,600 GitHub contributors, about 1,200 nf-core organization members, and over 10,000 Slack users at publication time.

Homebrew is only one install path; many scientific users install via the bootstrap script, Bioconda, containers, managed HPC modules, or Seqera tooling. Homebrew analytics reported 81 installs in 30 days, 322 in 90 days, and 845 in 365 days for the formula when queried on July 1, 2026.

How it is used

Package nerds use nextflow to launch a pipeline repository, pin parameters and profiles in nextflow.config, select an executor, and let Nextflow submit each process to the local machine, a scheduler, cloud batch service, or Kubernetes. The important package behavior is not a single executable doing one task, but a runner that downloads pipeline code, manages work directories, tracks process hashes, resolves containers/environments, and resumes partial runs.

In practice, users often run nf-core pipelines, institutional pipelines, or lab-specific workflows with profiles for Docker, Singularity/Apptainer, Conda, AWS Batch, Slurm, and other environments. The package is a small launcher with a large ecosystem around reproducibility, provenance, workflow sharing, and scientific support.

Why package nerds care

Nextflow is one of the major modern scientific workflow engines. In av.db it deserves richer history because package usage often implies access to repositories, tokens, cloud/HPC credentials, container registries, work directories, and config files, not just local command invocation.

Timeline

• 2013: Nextflow first appeared as an open source workflow project in the early public tag/release history.
• 2017-04-11: Nature Biotechnology published 'Nextflow enables reproducible computational workflows'.
• 2018: nf-core began building a community-curated Nextflow pipeline ecosystem.
• 2025-08-06: nf-core published a Genome Biology community-impact summary covering 2018 through mid-2025.
• 2026-06-17: GitHub page listed Nextflow 26.04.4 as latest stable release.
• 2026-07-01: Homebrew formula version observed as 26.04.4, with 845 formula installs over the preceding 365-day analytics window.

Related projects

• nf-core
• Seqera Platform
• Bioconda
• Docker
• Singularity/Apptainer
• Conda
• Slurm
• AWS Batch
• Kubernetes

Sources

• https://docs.seqera.io/nextflow/executor
• https://formulae.brew.sh/api/formula/nextflow.json
• https://github.com/nextflow-io/nextflow
• https://nf-co.re/blog/2025/paper-v2
• https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.3820
• https://www.nextflow.io/about-us.html