Quilt: Scientific Data Management on AWS

Quilt is a Scientific Data Management Platform on AWS that helps teams and AI find, trust, and reuse data through deeply versioned, context-rich data packages.

Most scientific organizations do not struggle to generate data. They struggle to keep it usable over time. As teams, tools, and workflows evolve, context gets lost, scientists cannot find what they need, data teams get pulled into manual support, and AI projects slow down because data lacks structure, lineage, and trust.

Quilt solves this by turning cloud data into durable, searchable, reusable packages. Each package captures data plus metadata, documentation, lineage, and version history needed for confident reuse. Built on AWS, Quilt works with data in place, so organizations can improve data management without disruptive migrations or rigid workflows.

Open Source and Enterprise

Quilt includes both open-source software and an enterprise platform deployment model.

• Open source (this repository):
  • Python SDK and CLI for creating Quilt packages, installing packages locally, and uploading packages to S3 using your AWS credentials
  • Package versioning, reproducibility, and documentation workflows that fit data science and bioinformatics workloads
  • Does not provide the full hosted search and visualization experience for package discovery and collaboration
• Enterprise platform:
  • Dedicated AWS-hosted Quilt platform for teams to search, share, and visualize Quilt packages
  • Multi-user collaboration and governance features on top of open-source package workflows

Start with:

• Open-source docs: docs/README.md
• Enterprise administration docs: docs/technical-reference.md
• Contributor guide: docs/CONTRIBUTING.md

Repository Map

Use this to find where each major part of Quilt lives.

Path	What it contains
api/python	quilt3 Python SDK, CLI, and Python tests
catalog	Quilt web catalog frontend (TypeScript/JavaScript)
lambdas	AWS Lambda services (indexing, previews, events, etc.)
shared	Shared schemas and cross-component assets
py-shared	Shared Python utilities used by services
s3-proxy	S3 proxy service components
docs	Product, platform, API, and contributor documentation
gendocs	API documentation generation tooling
testdocs	Documentation codeblock validation tools

Quick Start for Contributors

1. Clone and create a branch:

   git clone https://github.com/quiltdata/quilt
   cd quilt
   git checkout -b my-change

2. Install Python task runner:

   # macOS/Linux
   curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

3. Run Python tests:

   cd api/python
   uv run poe test

4. Run catalog locally:

   cd catalog
   npm install
   npm start

For full setup, testing, and release steps, see docs/CONTRIBUTING.md.

Learn More

• Product docs: docs.quilt.bio
• Open data demo catalog: open.quiltdata.com
• Case studies and customer stories: quilt.bio/case-studies
• Slack community: Join Quilt Slack