Remove nf-core branding from pipeline template

[drpatelh]

Description of feature

It would be awesome if we can have an option to remove the nf-core branding when creating pipelines and for this to work with all of the existing tooling we have.

A few members in the community including myself have created a number of pipelines now using the template but they arent likely to be contributed back to nf-core. Having this option saves having to manually replace bits everywhere.

We have some docs to do this manually on the website here but the idea is to replace most of this with a single command! 🔥

@robsyme (just sent you an invite to become a member of the community 🚀 ) has offered to help with the implementation.

I will let him fill in the details but some preliminary discussion was initiated on Slack here

The main complication will be how we get downstream tools like the linting, sync etc to play nicely with non-nf-core branded pipelines. We should add tests for this via Github Actions.

[Midnighter]

What was brought up in the discussion as well, is to add a flag when creating the pipeline to avoid the branding. Maybe it is easier to have options in the various jinja templates that avoids creating the files/sections related to branding.

[ewels]

What kind of stuff do you guys consider branding? I can think of obvious things like the logo in the readme, but not so much beyond that. Do you care about things like lib/* filenames etc or how far are you going down that road?

[drpatelh]

We should collect a list of any filenames, variables, comments, images that are using "nf-core" / "Nfcore" / etc and ideally replace as much as we can either with --prefix or something more generic to save having to use Jinja templating, renaming files etc. This should hopefully also make things easier to maintain in the long run if we do it right once.

[Midnighter]

or something more generic

Naming them for their purpose irrespective of nf-core gets my vote 👍🏼

What kind of stuff do you guys consider branding?

Good question 🙂

Things I thought of:

1. Printed banner/logo when running the pipeline
2. Project/pipeline being named nf-core-*
3. Apple in the logo

I think it would be fair to add a footer in the README that says, "generated with the nf-core tools template" or a similar message on non-branded projects. This is quite common, provides some attribution, but doesn't cause confusion on whether a project is nf-core or not.

[ErikDanielsson]

Closing due to merge of #1551.