Information adapted from ReproZip.org.
What is ReproZip?
ReproZip is a software packaging tool developed by Fernando Chirigati, Juliana Freire, Rémi Rampin, Dennis Shasha, and Vicky Steeves at NYU. ReproZip is designed to make the computational components of research easier to reproduce across different machines.
What can ReproZip help you do?
This tool helps ensure that reproducing an experiment isn’t waylaid by missing data files, libraries, or specifications; things that can be easy to overlook or take a lot of time to document. ReproZip helps researchers capture the information and components necessary to run their experiment into a single package that can then be shared and reproduced on a separate machine. Per the website, “ReproZip works by tracing the systems calls used by the experiment to automatically identify which files should be included. You can review and edit this list and the metadata before creating the final package file. Packages can be reproduced in different ways, including chroot environments, Vagrant-built virtual machines, and Docker containers; more can be added through plugins.”
How do you get it?
You can get ReproZip through their GitHub.
What else should you know?
The ReproZip tool has two components – reprozip, to pack the experiment, and reprounzip, to unpack the experiment. Currently, you can only use reprozip on Linux machines, but you can use reprounzip across Linux, Mac, and Windows.
You can read through their documentation to learn more about the tool. There are also examples available to explore.