reprotrail¶

reprotrail records the command, software state, inputs, runtime, and product metadata behind data-processing results. Use it to audit how a result was made, detect unacknowledged dependency changes, or prepare a workspace that restores the recorded source and Pixi environment.

Reprotrail is Pixi-first. Core provenance capture remains useful without Pixi, but complete runtime snapshots, dependency epochs, Git dependency freshness, and reproduction expect a Pixi project and lockfile.

Install¶

Reprotrail requires Python 3.11 or newer and Git. Install the full product metadata feature set from PyPI:

python -m pip install "reprotrail[products]"

Use python -m pip install reprotrail for the minimal package. Pixi is an external executable and must be installed separately for Pixi-backed features. After the conda-forge recipe is accepted, conda install -c conda-forge reprotrail will install the complete workflow, including Pixi and product metadata dependencies.

First recorded command¶

Run this from a clean Git project:

reprotrail run \
  --log results/example.log \
  --provenance-json results/example.prov.json \
  -- python -c "from pathlib import Path; Path('results').mkdir(exist_ok=True); Path('results/example.txt').write_text('done')"

The wrapped command creates results/example.txt; reprotrail creates the log and a versioned JSON provenance record. See Using reprotrail in practice (Introduction) for product sidecars, dependency checks, and reproduction.

:::{warning} Provenance records are not guaranteed to be anonymous or secret-free. They can contain command arguments, repository URLs, paths, dirty-file information, and whitelisted environment values. Review records before publishing them. :::

Development setup and contribution checks are documented in the repository’s contributor guide.