Common Workflow Language (CWL) is an open standard for describing how to run command line tools and connect them to create workflows.
Tools and workflows described using CWL are portable across a variety of platforms that support the CWL standards. Using CWL, it is easy to scale complex data analysis and machine learning workflows from a single developer’s laptop up to massively parallel cluster, cloud and high performance computing environments.
A standard for sharing and reusing workflows can provide a solution to describing portable,re-usable workflows while also being Workflow Orchestration and vendor-neutral. Although workflows are very popular (see our list of existing workflow systems), prior to the CWL standards every workflow system was incompatible with every other.
| Tool | Description |
|---|---|
| cwl-tool | Common Workflow Language reference implementation |
| Cwl-Airflow | Python package to extend Airflow functionality with CWL |