Galaxy Upgrade Highlights

List of new features in Galaxy 2018 upgrade

Performance and User Experience Improvements

We made Galaxy more lively and responsive. Homepage, published workflows, published/saved histories, and data libraries should all load much faster now. Importing data from FTP will also take less of your time. We achieved this by optimizing database queries, implementing the cache, rethinking presentation, and adding progress bars and loading indicators where needed.

Interactive Tours

The interactive tours framework allows developers and deployers to build interactive tutorials for users superimposed on the actual Galaxy web front end. Unlike video tutorials, these will not become stale and are truly interactive (allowing users to actually navigate and interact with Galaxy).

Nested Workflows

Workflows may now run other workflows as a single abstract step in the parent workflow. This allows for reusing or sub-workflows in your analyses.

Security and stability

There are numerous security and stability improvements in this release.

Workflow run form replaced

The workflow run form has been replaced by one backed by the new tool form and the API. Nicer, faster, standardized.

New interface for user preferences

User preferences menu has been reworked for clarity and consistency.

Tag your data with propagating hashtags

Large Galaxy histories used to be messy. Hashtags make it easy to track dataset (and collection) relationships.

Drag & Drop datasets into tool inputs

The interface now allows dragging datasets from history panel into the content selectors of the tool form.

Switch tool versions in workflows

You can now select exactly what version of the tool you want to use when building workflows.

Collections

Dataset Collection Usability

This release has significantly improved the usability of Galaxy dataset collections.

Upload directly to a collection

You can now bypass the history manipulation and upload your data straight into a collection for convenience.

Download entire collection

Downloading whole collections is now possible from the history interface.

Data types

Support for compressed FASTQ formats

You can now upload compressed (with gzip or bzip2) FASTQ files without them being unpacked automatically (as it was until now). For this, to work you have to select the proper type when uploading (e.g. instead of fastqsanger you select fastqsanger.gz or fastqsanger.bz2 for compressed files). Existing tools will work as before and future tools will be able to consume archives and save space in your quota.

New BAM datatypes

Previously Galaxy only supported coordinate sorted BAM files by default (the bam datatype).

New chemical datatypes

Galaxy now detects and supports many molecular datatypes.