Brei

Minimal workflow system and alternative to Make.

• Read from TOML or JSON (also pyproject.toml in [tool.brei] section)
• Only Python ≥ 3.11 required
• Runs task lazily and in parallel
• Supports variables, templates, includes and custom runners

Read more: documentation

Why (yet another workflow tool)

This tool was developed as part of the Entangled project, but can be used on its own. Brei is meant to perform small scale automisations for literate programming in Entangled, like generating figures, and performing computations locally. It requires no setup to work with and workflows are easy to understand by novice users. If you have any more serious needs than that, we'd recommend to use a more tried and proven system, of which there are too many to count.

When to use

You're running a project, there's lots of odds and ends that need automisation. You'd use a Makefile but your friend is on Windows and doesn't have GNU Make installed. You try to ship a product that needs this, but don't want to confront people trying it for the first time with a tonne of stuff they've never heard of.

Install

To install, you may:

pip install brei

Or you use a tool for virtual environments, we recommend Poetry, after creating a new project with poetry init:

poetry add brei

Development

To run unit tests and type checker:

poetry install
poetry shell
brei test

To build the documentation, run the brei weave workflow:

# poetry shell
brei weave

Some parts of Brei are literate. Run the entangled watch daemon while editing code,

entangled watch

or else, as a batch job, stitch changes before committing:

entangled stitch

License

Copyright Netherlands eScience Center, Apache License, see LICENSE.