recp A tool for automating command line recipes

recp (short for recipe) is a tool designed to automate processes that involve executing multiple sequential command-line steps. A recipe is defined in a .yaml file, which outlines the steps to be performed. Each step can include tags, a description, a set of environment variables to be set for that step, a working directory, and one or more commands to be executed. Additionally, commands can be preprocessed, allowing a single instruction to be expanded into multiple commands, thereby eliminating the need for tedious repeated and error-prone manual steps or scripts lacking flexibility.

A single recipe .yaml file can define multiple steps, which can be selected or filtered based on the task at hand. This flexibility allows you to execute only a subset of a larger recipe when needed. The --dry-run option enables generating the commands without actually running them, allowing you to verify that everything works as expected before executing time-consuming processes. If a step fails, the recipe can be resumed from that step with the --from option. Commands can also run in parallel and skip outputs that already exist, which is useful when processing large datasets.

Installation

You can directly install it using pip

pip install recp

or with uv

uv tool install recp

Quickstart

Check the quickstart guide here.

Documentation

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

mkdocs serve

Cite

If this package 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.