Run MultiQC in your browser

What is this?

This is the real MultiQC tool, running in your browser. No installation required, no data uploaded to the internet. Welcome to the future.

Who is it for?

This is great for anyone who gets emailed a zip file full of FastQC reports, who wants to quickly summarise them. It's good for running demos and training, and good for anyone who feels a cold sweat when they hear the words "now open the terminal".

What files am I meant to give it?

Feed it analysis outputs from bioinformatics tools supported by MultiQC. Don't worry about being selective, MultiQC will ignore any files it doesn't recognise (eg. those big BAM files). No data is transferred over the internet, only mounted from your local filesystem. So number and filesize of files shouldn't matter.

Note that currently it can only accept a single directory, so put everything you want to run inside that.

Do you have any I can try with?

Sure! All of the example reports have associated raw data for you to play with. In fact, there's some right here! Just remember to unzip the file before running with MultiQC.

How does it work?

This web page uses a relatively new technology called WebAssembly (Wasm). This builds a virtual machine within your browser, which can run compiled code. If you're familiar with Docker, it's a similar concept.

Here, we're using Pyodide, a Python distribution built for Wasm. It lets us install packages from the Python Package Index (PyPI) and has a robust Javascript interface for interacting with the browser. This lets us install and run MultiQC entirely within the browser Wasm virtual machine without needing any other installation requirements, and without any data transfer to the web.

Will this replace the command-line version of MultiQC?

Not at all. Most people run MultiQC in a non-interactive setting, such as a step in an analysis pipeline. That will remain the primary interface to MultiQC.

This is just a bit of fun which is hopefully helpful for a group of people not comfortable with terminals and CLIs

So is my data being uploaded?

No, this is entirely local to your browser. Try turning wifi off after the page has loaded - it should still all work!

I gave it a FastQ file, but it said no files found

That's because MultiQC uses outputs from other analysis tools, it doesn't do the analysis itself. Check out the documentation for more details.