Galactic Weekly: Week 8, 2026

Galactic Weekly

Summary

Repositories with activity: 25
New issues: 53
Issues closed: 54
PRs opened: 155
PRs merged: 91
Contributors: 51

Highlights

This week the Galaxy Project merged 91 pull requests across 25 repositories with contributions from 51 developers. The main Galaxy platform received bug fixes for the Beta Upload Activity feature, file handling improvements for OMERO and dataset previews, and updated Python dependencies. The team also updated the project website with content fixes and navigation improvements, added new analysis tools including Psauron and chromap to the community toolshed, and resolved broken links across training tutorials. Development work focused on stability improvements and maintaining existing functionality rather than introducing new features.

Most Active Repositories

Repository	PRs Opened	PRs Merged	Issues Opened	Issues Closed
galaxy	26	16	21	18
galaxy-hub	30	21	5	5
tools-iuc	26	12	4	25
training-material	16	14	5	3
usegalaxy-tools	10	4	1	0
galaxy_codex	7	3	2	1
brc-analytics	4	1	11	0
iwc	7	2	1	0
planemo	5	3	0	1
galaxy-skills	4	3	1	0

Repository Summaries

galaxy

This week, the Galaxy Project focused heavily on bug fixes and improvements to the Beta Upload Activity feature, with merged changes preventing uploads to inactive histories, creating dataset collections directly, and fixing credential validation in tool forms. The development team also addressed several file handling issues, including fixes for OMERO file source downloads, dataset preview request loops, and ASCP download retries. Additionally, Python dependencies were updated and the project moved away from using pkg_resources in favor of more modern alternatives.

galaxy-hub

The Galaxy Project hub repository received updates to its Astro-based website migration, including fixes for style loading issues, content rendering problems, and search functionality improvements. The team added a new blog post about a misconception paper, updated team member details and biographical information, and enhanced the homepage navigation with a sticky masthead design. Additionally, they updated metadata tags and funding information across various pages, added a new Matrix room for Earth Climate Ecology Sciences, and published the weekly newsletter for week 7 of 2026.

galaxy-k8s-boot

This week, the galaxy-k8s-boot repository merged one pull request that added direct support for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Batch runner functionality. This change enables the Galaxy Kubernetes deployment tool to work directly with GCP’s Batch service for running computational jobs.

iwc

This week, the Galaxy Project’s “iwc” repository received two merged updates: a dependency bump upgrading the devalue package from version 5.6.2 to 5.6.3 in the website component, and a new version of the VGP precuration workflow. Additionally, a new issue was reported regarding workflow imports potentially not importing workflow readme files properly.

training-material

The Galaxy Project training-material repository received 14 merged pull requests this week, primarily focused on fixing broken links and citations across tutorials. Key changes included resolving table of contents loading issues, updating external tutorial links, correcting citations in bioimage analysis tutorials, and adding a “Choose Your Own Adventure” feature to the Voronoi segmentation tutorial that allows users to select content based on their scientific field. Five new issues were opened reporting tutorial navigation problems and missing content, while three existing issues were resolved.

galaxy_codex

This week’s activity for the Galaxy Project’s “galaxy_codex” repository focused on disabling citation-fetching functionality, with two pull requests that commented out or disabled fetch-citations jobs in workflow dependencies. The team also added a usegalaxy configuration file to the lab folder and addressed a workflow listing issue. Two new issues were identified regarding inaccurate tutorial visitor statistics and oversized weekly update pull requests.

planemo

This week, the planemo repository updated its code to replace distutils (which was removed in Python 3.12) to maintain compatibility with newer Python versions. The development team also implemented the “uv” package manager to speed up test execution and modified the system to accept “completed” as a valid terminal state for invocations. Additionally, they closed an issue related to implementing a --number 2 option for the planemo test command.

tools-iuc

The tools-iuc repository merged 12 pull requests this week, including two new tools (Psauron and chromap), version updates for six existing tools (fastreer, volcanoplot, legsta, htseq_count, and bigwig_outlier_bed), and several bug fixes for tools like Fastq dl, hyphy annotate, and samtools fixmate. The repository also closed 25 issues, many of which were tool requests that have been fulfilled, while opening 4 new issues including bug reports for pysradb and shovill tools.

usegalaxy-tools

This week, the Galaxy Project’s usegalaxy-tools repository updated the Diamond tool to version 2.1.22 and restricted it to metagenomic analysis workflows. The team also installed new tools from the Intergalactic Workflow Commission (IWC) for both cloud infrastructure and the main usegalaxy.org server, and added the samtools collate tool. One bug report was filed regarding the gi2taxonomy tool for fetching taxonomic ranks.

galaxy-language-server

This week, the Galaxy Project’s galaxy-language-server repository had one merged pull request that prepared version 0.15.0 for release. The activity focused on packaging and release preparation rather than new feature development or bug fixes.

infrastructure-playbook

This week, the Galaxy Project’s infrastructure-playbook repository had one merged pull request that modified the tool shed configuration settings. The change involved adjusting parameters in the tool shed setup, though the specific technical details of what was tweaked were not provided in the activity summary.

galaxy-skills

This week, the Galaxy Project’s “galaxy-skills” repository consolidated its tool development documentation into a single comprehensive reference and added a new skill for updating tools on UseGalaxy servers. A proposal was also submitted to establish the repository as a marketplace for Claude Code plugins.

total-perspective-vortex

The Galaxy Project repository “total-perspective-vortex” merged one pull request this week that upgraded the project to use uv (a Python package manager) and Python 3.10. The update also implemented parallel test execution to improve build times.

galaxy-mcp

This week, the Galaxy Project’s “galaxy-mcp” repository received two updates focused on stability and compatibility. The team added version limits to production dependencies to prevent potential conflicts and fixed issues with IWC functions that were failing when using fastmcp version 3.0.0 or higher.

bioblend

This week, the Galaxy Project’s bioblend repository had two pull requests merged that focused on state management improvements. The changes fixed how the system checks for successful operations and added support for tracking a “completed” state in the codebase.

gxformat2

This week, the gxformat2 repository merged one pull request that added support for URL and TRS URL references in subworkflow run fields. This change allows workflows to reference subworkflows using direct URLs or Tool Registry Service (TRS) URLs, expanding the ways workflows can be composed and linked together.

tools-devteam

The Galaxy Project’s tools-devteam repository received two updates this week. The repository was updated to release version 26.0, and developers removed the use of pkg_resources, likely replacing it with a more modern Python packaging alternative.

planemo-monitor

This week, the Galaxy Project’s planemo-monitor repository had one merged pull request that reverted previous fixes. Additionally, one issue was closed related to failing builds when issues are detected.

ga2

This week, one new issue was opened in the Galaxy Project’s “ga2” repository regarding VGP Phase 1 Publication Readiness, which focuses on assembly synchronization, indexing, and Galaxy integration. The issue appears to address technical requirements for preparing Vertebrate Genomes Project data for publication within the Galaxy platform.

brc-analytics

The brc-analytics repository released version 0.23.0 this week. Development focus shifted toward workflow management features, with 11 new issues created covering workflow list pages, configuration interfaces, and a workflow-first analysis flow. Additional planned work includes UI improvements like assembly selection modals and sidebar details, plus integration tasks for LexicMap and stepper components.

idc

This week, the Galaxy Project’s “idc” repository had one new issue opened regarding which UCSC genomes should be used for automated runs. The issue references a related discussion in the project forum for additional context.