About

Why APIBlocks ?

Bioinformatics tools are powerful and drive biological research. Yet, while the world is migrating to cloud, bioinformatics is still stuck in the era of command-line tools and uses files as data-exchange medium. As a result, building complex pipelines becomes a hell of dependency and file management and is often not possible from a local environment due to time and computational power required to run them.

APIBlocks offers an alternative way, where all computational infrastructure and tools are already set up and ready to accept your data. We are taking your favourite open-source tools, rewriting the interface and making them available through a web API.

When you send a request to run one of the methods in the collection, we will validate the data, run the method, and send you the results back. No time wasted installing a new tool and you can use any of your favourite programming languages to send the request. The results will come back nicely-formatted and ready for use as inputs to other methods in the APIBlocks collection or for your custom downstream analysis.

As such, you can use APIBlocks to quickly test new ideas or run ad-hoc analyses, build pipelines or use it as a back-end for modern web applications.

FAQ

How much does it cost?

Right now it's free. Just join the discord server and request an access token.

What's actually running on the backend when I make a query?

Depends on the query. We use third-party open-source packages. References to the packages are in the documentation.

How can I make a call to the API?

You can use any of the programming languages to send an HTTP request. We are working on a Python client that will make talking with APIBlocks server a bit easier.

Can I self-host?

Not at the moment. But drop us a line, maybe we can figure something out.