recp: command-line pipelines defined in YAML

recp (short for recipe) runs processes made of multiple command-line steps. A recipe is a .yaml file that lists the steps to run. Each step can have tags, a description, environment variables, a working folder and one or more commands. Commands can be pre-processed with modifiers, so that a single command template is expanded into many commands, e.g. one per file in a folder or one per combination of parameter values.

A recipe can contain many steps, and a subset of them can be selected by name or tag. The --dry-run option prints the commands without running them, and a failed run can be resumed from a given step with --from. Commands of a step can run in parallel, and commands whose outputs already exist can be skipped, which is useful when processing large datasets.

While the commands of a parallel step run, recp shows a table with the status and last output line of each command. Their output is saved, so it can be read later or followed from another terminal:

recp run recipe.yaml --jobs 4                   # run up to 4 commands at a time in parallel steps
recp status                                     # status of the commands of the latest run
recp log 3                                      # output of command 3
recp follow 2                                   # stream the output of command 2 while it runs

Installation

recp is best installed as a uv tool:

uv tool install recp

It can also be installed with pip:

pip install recp

Quickstart

See the quickstart guide.

Documentation

The recp documentation is available online. You can also build and view it locally by running:

uv run --extra docs mkdocs serve

Cite

If recp contributed to your work, please consider citing it:

@misc{recp,
  author = {Esteban Gómez},
  title  = {recp},
  year   = 2026,
  url    = {https://github.com/eagomez2/recp}
}

License

For further details about the license of this package, please see LICENSE.