Why epi4you exists

Oxford Nanopore’s EPI2ME Desktop gives users a convenient local environment for running and browsing nanopore workflows. That convenience is valuable, but it also means a completed analysis is spread across several concerns:

  • the workflow output itself,

  • the metadata that lets the GUI present the run coherently,

  • the workflow identity and versioning information, and

  • sometimes related software assets such as containers or workflow trees.

For everyday use on a single workstation, that is fine.

For training and deployment work, it becomes awkward.

The practical problem

If you need to prepare twenty laptops for a workshop, or preload a conference demo machine, copying one output directory is often not enough.

Typical problems include:

  • the target machine has no matching EPI2ME database entry,

  • the original workflow version is not obvious,

  • the GUI expects helper files that a plain CLI run never created,

  • internet access is limited or unavailable, and

  • rebuilding analyses from raw data would take too long.

epi4you’s answer

epi4you exists to make that liftover explicit and repeatable.

The software packages a run into a manifest-driven archive so the transfer is not just “copy these files and hope”. Instead the archive includes:

  • a typed payload description,

  • a file inventory,

  • provenance,

  • a lightweight integrity check, and

  • enough reconstructed metadata to make the imported result behave like an EPI2ME-style analysis.

Why the project is broader than the current CLI

The repository contains logic for several related asset classes:

  • Desktop analysis records,

  • workflow installations,

  • Docker/container artefacts, and

  • historical Nextflow CLI runs.

The currently active entry points focus on packaging a CLI Nextflow run and importing a .2me archive, but the wider codebase reflects the broader problem the project was created to solve: moving complete bioinformatics assets between machines, not just moving raw result files.

Audience

The tool is especially well suited to:

  • trainers and course organizers,

  • field teams carrying prebuilt examples,

  • demo and conference operators,

  • support engineers reproducing representative analyses, and

  • labs that need to share curated EPI2ME-ready examples internally.