---
title: "Bytesize: Get your containers with \"Nextflow inspect\""
description: "Fetch all container URIs from a pipeline in one command"
url: "https://phil.ewels.co.uk/talks/2024/05/28/bytesize_nextflow_inspect"
site: "phil.ewels.co.uk"
author: "Phil Ewels"
section: "Talks"
type: "Bytesize"
date: "2024-05-28"
location: "Online"
event: "https://nf-co.re/events/2024/bytesize_pipeline_container_urls"
---

# Bytesize: Get your containers with "Nextflow inspect"

> Fetch all container URIs from a pipeline in one command

With the advent of DSL2, nf-core pipelines began to use separate containers for every process.
Now, many nf-core pipelines can have upwards of 50 different software containers in a single run.
Traditionally, finding the URIs for each of these containers was a difficult task, with several people developing tooling based around regular expressions.

In Nextflow `23.09.0-edge` a new subcommand was added called `nextflow inspect`.
This command retrieves all of the containers that will be used by a pipeline run and returns them in Nextflow config syntax.

In this talk, Phil Ewels ([@ewels](https://github.com/ewels/)) will guides us through the process of fetching container URIs using `nextflow inspect`
and show how this can be used to customise containers in a pipeline. This may be of particular use to people working in environments that cannot
access our public container registries or who may need additional steps in their container verification steps.

> Unfortunately, the recordings for this bytesize was corrupted. Some of the content, however, was repeated in the bytesize [Bytesize: Explaining Wave containers](https://nf-co.re/events/2024/bytesize_using_wave).

---

From the personal website of Phil Ewels, a software developer and bioinformatician in Stockholm, Sweden: https://phil.ewels.co.uk/
The whole site as Markdown: https://phil.ewels.co.uk/llms.txt