DataLad — data management and publication multitool

Welcome to DataLad’s technical documentation. Information here is targeting software developers and is focused on the Python and command line APIs, as well as software design, employed technologies, and key features. Comprehensive user documentation with information on installation, basic operation, support, and (advanced) use case descriptions is available in the DataLad handbook.

Content

• Change log
• Acknowledgments
• Publications

Concepts and technologies

• Background and motivation
  • Vision
  • Technological foundation: git-annex
  • Objective
• Delineation from related solutions
  • Data catalogs
  • Data delivery/management middleware
  • Git/Git-annex/DataLad
• Basic principles
  • Datasets
  • Basic command line usage
  • API principles
• Metadata
  • Overview
  • Supported metadata sources
  • Metadata aggregation and query
  • Internal metadata representation
  • Vocabulary
• Customization and extension of functionality
  • Plugins
  • Extension packages
• Design patterns
  • Generator methods in Repo classes
  • Calls to Git commands
• Glossary

Commands and API

• Command line reference
  • Main command
  • Dataset operations
  • Metadata handling
  • Reproducible execution
  • Miscellaneous commands
  • Plugin commands
  • Plumbing commands
• Python module reference
  • High-level user interface
  • Support functionality
  • Configuration management
  • Test infrastructure
  • Command line interface infrastructure
• Configuration
  • Global user configuration
  • Local repository configuration
  • Sticky dataset configuration
  • Miscellaneous configuration

Extension packages

DataLad can be customized and additional functionality can be integrated via extensions. Each extension provides its own documentation:

• Crawling web resources and automated data distributions
• Neuroimaging data and workflows
• Containerized computational environments
• Advanced metadata tooling with JSON-LD reporting and additional metadata extractors

Indices and tables

• Index
• Module Index
• Search Page