Eco-Flow Basic Nextflow Training

A hands-on course that takes you from limited bioinformatics experience to running your own nf-core pipelines. It's pitched at beginners — no prior Nextflow experience is needed, and only basic command-line familiarity is assumed (Part 1 covers the terminal from scratch if you're new to it; the later differential-expression part assumes a little R). Everything runs in the browser via GitHub Codespaces, so there's nothing to install.

Prefer to learn with us live? See our upcoming training events →

This course was developed with the support of BioFAIR

Course outline

Work through it, step by step

Each part opens right here on the site. Start at the top — or jump to whatever you need.

  1. 0

    Setup Practical

    Get your environment ready with GitHub Codespaces, so you can run everything from your browser.

    Open lesson →
  2. 1

    Command line basics Practical · optional

    A gentle introduction to the command line. Skip this part if you're already comfortable in a terminal.

    Open lesson →
  3. 2

    Pipelines with Nextflow Lecture

    What Nextflow and nf-core are, and why pipelines matter for reproducible, scalable science.

    Open lesson →
  4. 3

    Run an nf-core RNA-Seq pipeline Practical

    Hands-on — run a real nf-core/rnaseq analysis end to end, from raw reads to results.

    Open lesson →
  5. 4

    Differential gene expression Practical · R

    Take the counts from the RNA-Seq pipeline and find what changed — normalise with DESeq2, run differential expression, and interpret the results in R.

    Open lesson →
  6. 5

    Run an nf-core ampliseq pipeline Practical

    Hands-on — run nf-core/ampliseq on 16S amplicon data from river and soil samples, from raw reads to taxonomic classification, diversity stats and a QC report.

    Open lesson →
  7. 6

    Run the nanopore metabarcoding pipeline Practical

    Hands-on — run Eco-Flow's nanoporemetabarcoding pipeline end to end, from raw Nanopore reads to a taxonomically-annotated community table.

    Open lesson →
  8. 7

    Interacting with code on GitHub Practical

    Issues, pull requests, READMEs and Claude Code — how to report, fix and contribute changes to a pipeline, using nanoporemetabarcoding as the worked example.

    Open lesson →
  9. 8

    Running a pipeline on an HPC Practical · optional

    Run an nf-core pipeline on a Slurm/SGE cluster that's already set up — get the pipeline, submit and watch jobs, keep Nextflow alive, and avoid common mistakes. Practise on a mini Slurm cluster in Codespaces.

    Open lesson →
  10. 9

    Monitoring runs with Seqera Platform Practical · optional

    Follow your runs live in the browser with Seqera Platform, from Codespaces or your HPC, plus an overview of launching pipelines from it.

    Open lesson →
  11. ★

    Advanced: setting up Nextflow for your HPC Advanced

    Advanced material for people setting up Nextflow on a cluster with no ready-made config — what to ask your HPC team, where to find configs, and how to adapt and test one. Reading and reference, not a hands-on run.

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Dive into the material

Grab the full course (data, scripts and Codespaces config) on GitHub, or try the official Nextflow training to go further.