The aim of this tutorial is to introduce you to ecFlow functionality by building a set of simple suites. Some extension exercises then follow. For additional information and introduction to ecFlow please see: Ecflow User Manual

Each page will introduce a new concept and provides a list of things to do. Within most pages, there are hypertext links that point to relevant information in the online ecFlow documentation.

There are two main methods for describing a suite to the ecFlow server. The first is to write a text definition file which is then loaded to the server. The grammar of this text definition file is described here Definition file Grammar . This grammar does not support conditional statements (such as if, while, for) nor the ability to define functions. However, the text definition file can be written using any language which in itself supports conditional statements.  

However, ecFlow can also be accessed using a Python API which allows more functionality and as such is our preferred way to define suites to the ecFlow server. See ecFlow Python Api .


The following tutorial will show examples in plain text and Python. Although plain text is fine for simple suites, it is recommended that you use Python. Later tutorial examples use conditional statements available through the Python interface like ‘if’ and looping constructs.


This tutorial covers many topics. Rather than typing in by hand