How to add new tools

Guiding principles

To decide if a tool should be packaged in a Neurocontainers or be installed in the Neurodesktop container, we are currently following these guiding principles:

1) Neurodesk is a Platform, Not a Package Manager: We don’t distribute tools that can be easily installed via standard package managers.

2) Multiple versions of tools: Neurodesk supports the use of multiple versions of a tool in parallel via lmod. If a tool doesn’t support this, follow this instruction to package it in Neurocontainers.

3) Inter-Container Tool Linking: Neurodesk is designed to facilitate the linking of tools from different containers, such as workflow managers like nipype or nextflow. Therefore, if a tool is needed to coordinate various container-tools, create an issue to have it installed directly in the Neurodesktop container.

Examples:

Adding new tools to Neurocontainers:

Follow these instructions to add new tools: https://www.neurodesk.org/developers/new_tools/manual_build