IRIDA 20.09 Released

September 24, 2020

IRIDA’s 20.09 release is now available for download. Find the new release at https://github.com/phac-nml/irida/releases.

Many of this release’s new features focus on making IRIDA a better platform for pipeline developers, administrators, and upgrading a number of IRIDA’s pages to use more modern web technologies.

Administrator Panel

The most obvious new interface improvement in IRIDA 20.09 is the upgraded administrator panel. This new panel centralizes a number of the administrator facing features into a single more appropriate workspace. Features added to this panel include user and group management, OAuth2 client management, connecting to remote IRIDA installations, managing NCBI exports, and adding or managing dashboard announcements.

Watch this space for additional administrator features such as viewing system usage statistics, managing resources such as analysis submissions, server settings, etc.

Analysis Pipeline Viewers for Plugins

This release of IRIDA allows pipeline plugins to use IRIDA’s integrated pipeline result viewers with their analysis tools. The main use for this feature is expected to be with IRIDA’s phylogenetic tree viewer and metadata tools. To use this feature, pipeline plugin developers will simply need to add a small component to their plugin to tell IRIDA which analysis results view to display. To add this to your pipeline tool, see more at https://irida.corefacility.ca/documentation/developer/tools/pipelines/#326-optional-set-a-viewer-for-analysis-results.

Future IRIDA releases aim to allow developers to package their own analysis results views for even better tool integration options.

Analysis Pipeline Updates

This IRIDA update also upgrades 2 of IRIDA’s core analysis pipelines to their latest versions.

IRIDA’s SNP phylogenomics pipeline (SNVPhyl) is upgraded to the latest version available in Galaxy, version 1.2.2.

The assembly and annotation pipeline also includes updates to Shovill, Prokka, and Quast. This upgrade also removes the common tbl2asn expiry issue.

With both of these pipeline upgrades, this removes the dependency on IRIDA’s Galaxy toolshed and shifts to using the main Galaxy toolshed for all tool installations. This will allow IRIDA installations to upgrade their Galaxy instances to newer versions (20.XX+).

Synchronization of Assembly Data

With the 20.05 release of IRIDA more focus was given to the management of assembly and consensus data. Working further along these lines the 20.09 release of IRIDA adds the ability to synchronize assembly data between IRIDA installations. This will include both assemblies generated by IRIDA’s assembly and annotation pipelines, and assemblies uploaded through the web or IRIDA’s REST API.

Future IRIDA releases intend to add more functionality with assemblies including running analysis tools, and more synchronization options.

Other changes

In addition to the above features, this version of IRIDA includes updates to a number of pages and bug fixes:

  • Updates to project metadata templates management page
  • Updates to NCBI exports page
  • Redesigned sample creation page
  • Updates to project user groups page
  • Removal of Gravatar for user images
  • Fixes to metadata toggles in the phylogenomic metadata visualization page
  • Fixes to number formatting when uploading metadata
  • Better error handling for adding samples to projects in the REST API

For a full list of changes in this IRIDA release, see our changelog at https://github.com/phac-nml/irida/blob/20.09/CHANGELOG.md.