Renku

Renku is an open-source platform that connects the ecosystem of data, code, and compute to empower researchers to build collaborative communities. It is aimed at independent researchers and data scientists as well as labs, collaborations, and courses and workshops.

Once a Renku project is configured, anyone using it can take advantage of convenient access to data and code within pre-configured computational sessions. Projects are assembled by piecing together:

• Data connectors: connect virtually any cloud-based or on-premise data source, like S3 buckets, WebDav or SFTP servers. Once you create a data connector, it can be reused across all of your projects and even be made available to your group or community.

• Source code: link the source code repositories you are used to, like GitHub or GitLab and easily work on it within your project sessions.

• Compute environments: use one of our pre-configure environments with VSCode, RStudio or Jupyter inside or have Renku build an image to match your repository\'s requirements. Alternatively, bring your own docker image and share it easily with others to really make your code and data sing.

[!NOTE] We’re discontinuing Renku Legacy and the RenkuLab GitLab by January 2026 to focus all development efforts on the newly launched version of Renku, Renku 2.0. To learn more, including how to maintain access to your Renku Legacy projects, see our transition guide.

Getting Started

A public instance of RenkuLab is available at https://renkulab.io. To start exploring Renku, feel free to make an account and try it out! You can follow the hands-on tutorial or visit our Community Portal.

Documentation

• Tutorials: how to get your Renku work off the ground
• How-to Guides: recipes for common use-cases with Renku for users and administrators
• Reference: various concepts explained in detail
• Renku 2.0 blog: discover what is new in Renku, for example How Renku 2.0 is different from Renku Legacy
• \"Legacy\" documentation: the documentation pages for the previous version of the platform

Contributing

We\'re happy to receive contributions of all kinds, whether it is an idea for a new feature, a bug report or a pull request!

Please review our contributing guidelines before submitting a pull request.

Getting in touch

There are several channels you can use to communicate with us; we monitor all of them, so your messages will always get to us, but communication will be slightly more streamlined if you pick a channel that most suits your purpose and needs.

• discourse: questions concerning Renkulab, your feature requests or feedback
• github: create platform-usability and software-bug issues
• gitter: communicate with the team

Renku is developed as an open source project by the Swiss Data Science Center in a team split between EPFL and ETHZ.

Project structure

Renku is built from several sub-repositories:

• renku-data-services: backend services providing the majority of the platform user-facing functionality.
• renku-ui: web front-end.
• renku-gateway: a simple API gateway.
• amalthea: k8s operator for user session servers.
• renkulab-docker: base images for interactive sessions.

Citing Renku in research papers

If you use the Renku platform for your research, please do cite our paper. See the citation information in the side panel of this repo for APA and BibTex formats.