To follow the Common Workflow Language user guide, you will need an up-to-date Linux or Mac OS X system, with the following software installed:
- A text editor with YAML support, for example Visual Studio Code with the Benten (CWL) plugin. If you want to use a different text editor then review this list of plugins that add CWL support to code editors
- A CWL implementation to run the described tools and workflows. When first
getting started with CWL, we recommend the reference implementation,
cwltool
. You can find a full list on the project homepage. - Most of the software tools used in the user guide are standard UNIX commands
(
cat
,echo
,env
,tar
,touch
,wc
), but to run all examples you will also need:- node.js
- Java compiler
- Docker (optional)