With Docker

You can run Nextclade in a Docker container.

Docker container images are available at Docker Hub: 🐋 nextstrain/nextclade

Pull and run the latest released version with:

docker pull nextstrain/nextclade:latest
docker run -it --rm nextstrain/nextclade:latest nextclade --help

Pull and run a specific version with:

docker run -it --rm nextstrain/nextclade:3.0.0 nextclade --help

⚠️ Don’t forget to mount necessary docker volumes to be able to supply the data into the container and to access the results. You may want to also add --user argument to docker command, to run on behalf of a non-root user and group. This is not specific to Nextclade. Explanation of Docker containers is out of scope of this documentation - please refer to Docker documentation for more details.

All images are multi-platform (amd64 and arm64). Pulling on an ARM64 host (Apple Silicon, AWS Graviton, Raspberry Pi) gets a native image automatically.

Docker images are available based on the following images:

  • debian (default): Nextclade executable + basic Linux utilities (bash, curl, wget) for use in workflows

  • alpine: Alpine Linux + Nextclade executable, for small image size

  • scratch: empty image + Nextclade executable, for minimal size

Each base is published for multiple versions (e.g., debian13, debian12, debian11, alpine3.23, alpine3.18). Unversioned tags (:debian, :alpine) point to the latest base version.

You can choose to use the latest available version (use tag :latest or no tag), or to freeze a specific version (e.g. :3.0.0) or only major version (e.g. :3), or a base image (e.g. :debian) or both version and base image (e.g. :3.0.0-debian), or a specific base version (e.g. :3.0.0-debian13), or mix and match. Tag :latest points to :debian. See the full list of tags here.

Example

This is a simple example for Linux.

docker run -it --rm \
  --volume="$(pwd):/data/" \
  --user="$(id -u):$(id -g)" \
  "nextstrain/nextclade" \
  nextclade run \
      --dataset-name="sars-cov-2" \
      --output-dir="/data/output/" \
      "/data/my_sequences.fasta"

In this example, Docker mounts current working directory on your computer $(pwd) as a volume at path /data/ inside the container. It starts a container from our image tagged nextstrain/nextclade on behalf of the current user (command id -u prints id of the current user and id -g prints id of the current user’s group) and runs our Nextclade CLI command in it. Nextclade reads sequences from /data/my_sequences.fasta inside the container which corresponds to my_sequences.fasta in your current directory. Then Nextclade writes output files to /data/output/ directory in the container, which corresponds to the output/ directory in your current working directory.