rocrate
RO-Crate metadata generator/parser
Decision gist · record as of 2026-08-14
Yes, if you need to create or work with RO-Crate metadata packages for research data management. The library is actively maintained, has low install friction, carries no known vulnerabilities, and uses a permissive license. It is suitable for production use in research workflows, though its Alpha status suggests the API may evolve—pin the version if stability is critical.AI-flagged interpretation of the facts on this page — verify before relying
Before you install
- Requires Python 3.9 or later.
- Low install friction with a pure-Python wheel and five common dependencies.
- Active maintenance with a recent release 35 days ago and ongoing repository activity.
License · maintenance · safety
Apache-2.0 (permissive) — Licensed under Apache-2.0 (permissive), allowing commercial and private use with minimal restrictions beyond attribution and liability disclaimers.
last release 2026-07-10 (35 days) · last repo commit 2026-07-10 · 86 stars
0 known vulnerabilities (OSV.dev, 2026-08-14) · 256,156 downloads/mo, #8,467 on PyPI
Alternatives
Verify before relying
pip install rocrate
from rocrate.rocrate import ROCrate
from rocrate.model.person import Person
crate = ROCrate()
paper = crate.add_file("paper.pdf", properties={"name": "manuscript"})
alice = crate.add(Person(crate, "https://orcid.org/0000-0000-0000-0000", properties={"name": "Alice"}))
paper["author"] = [alice]
crate.write("output_crate")- Whether the library handles all RO-Crate 1.2 specification features or only a subset of entity types.
- Performance characteristics when working with large crates or many files.
- Whether the ga2cwl extra dependency is maintained and what Galaxy workflow conversion coverage it provides.
What it is and what it does
rocrate is a Python library that implements the RO-Crate specification for packaging research outputs with structured metadata. It lets you create crates by adding files, directories, and contextual entities (persons, organizations, etc.) and then expressing relationships between them—all serialized to a JSON-LD metadata file alongside the data. The library handles both creation (building crates from local or remote files) and consumption (reading existing crates), supporting RO-Crate versions 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2.
The library abstracts away the JSON-LD and URI encoding details, providing a Python object model where you add files and entities, set properties, and write the result to disk or a zip archive. It depends on requests, arcp, jinja2, python-dateutil, and click—all stable, widely-used packages. The codebase is actively maintained and classified as Alpha, indicating it is functional but may still evolve.
Use it for
- Package research datasets with metadata describing authors, affiliations, and data provenance for archival or sharing.
- Create reproducible research bundles that include code, data, and documentation with explicit relationships between components.
- Convert existing file collections into RO-Crate format for compliance with research data management standards.
- Build metadata-driven workflows where research outputs are tagged with contextual information and serialized for preservation.
- Integrate RO-Crate generation into data processing pipelines to automatically document inputs, outputs, and processing steps.
Worth the install?
AI-flagged interpretation of the facts on this page. Verify before relying on it.
Yes, if you need to create or work with RO-Crate metadata packages for research data management.
The library is actively maintained, has low install friction, carries no known vulnerabilities, and uses a permissive license. It is suitable for production use in research workflows, though its Alpha status suggests the API may evolve—pin the version if stability is critical.
Install
rocrate on PyPI
Before you install
Low install friction with a pure-Python wheel and five common dependencies. Active maintenance with a recent release 35 days ago and ongoing repository activity.
Requires Python 3.9 or later.
License in practice
Licensed under Apache-2.0 (permissive), allowing commercial and private use with minimal restrictions beyond attribution and liability disclaimers.
Quickstart
pip install rocrate
from rocrate.rocrate import ROCrate
from rocrate.model.person import Person
crate = ROCrate()
paper = crate.add_file("paper.pdf", properties={"name": "manuscript"})
alice = crate.add(Person(crate, "https://orcid.org/0000-0000-0000-0000", properties={"name": "Alice"}))
paper["author"] = [alice]
crate.write("output_crate")Verify before relying
- Whether the library handles all RO-Crate 1.2 specification features or only a subset of entity types.
- Performance characteristics when working with large crates or many files.
- Whether the ga2cwl extra dependency is maintained and what Galaxy workflow conversion coverage it provides.
Package facts
| License | Apache-2.0 permissive |
| Python support | Supports the current Python release >=3.9 |
| Install friction | Low. Pure-Python wheel |
| Runtime dependencies | 5 packagesrequestsarcpjinja2python-dateutilclick |
| Maintenance | Actively maintained 35 days since the last release |
| Last repo commit | |
| First released | |
| Downloads | 256,156 / month, #8,467 on PyPI 30-day window, as of 2026-08-14 |
| Known vulnerabilities | None known OSV.dev, checked 2026-08-14 |
| Classifiers | Development Status :: 3 - AlphaIntended Audience :: DevelopersIntended Audience :: Information TechnologyOperating System :: OS IndependentProgramming Language :: Python :: 3Programming Language :: Python :: 3.10Programming Language :: Python :: 3.11Programming Language :: Python :: 3.12Programming Language :: Python :: 3.9Topic :: InternetTopic :: Internet :: WWW/HTTPTopic :: Software Development :: LibrariesTopic :: System :: ArchivingTopic :: System :: Archiving :: Packaging |
Evidence: rocrate-0.15.1-py3-none-any.whl
Tags
Let your AI agent find packages like this
Example. Real query, live index.
You found this page by searching. An agent finds it by wishing: SkillFed indexes 14,416 PyPI packages by what they can do, searchable in plain language.
wish › “research object crate metadata”
- rocraterocrate is a Python library for creating and consuming Research…
- roc-validatorValidates RO-Crate metadata packages against declared profiles using…
- flpcflpc wraps the Rust regex crate to provide faster regular expression…
Give your agent the search over MCP, or paste the wish link into any chat.
More Libraries packages
urllib3 is an HTTP client library that provides thread-safe connection pooling, SSL/TLS verification, multipart file uploads, request retries, compression support, and proxy handling for Python applications.
Requests is a Python HTTP library that simplifies sending HTTP/1.1 requests with automatic handling of headers, authentication, cookies, and response parsing.
Pluggy provides a plugin system that lets you define hook specifications and register implementations to be called in sequence, enabling extensible Python applications without tight coupling.
Install it if you're building an extensible application or framework.
Provides parsing, arithmetic, and recurrence rule computation for dates and times, with timezone support and iCalendar RFC compliance.
Install it if you need to parse flexible date strings, compute relative dates, handle timezones, or work with recurrence rules—it's the de facto choice for these tasks.
Six provides utility functions to write Python code that runs on both Python 2.7 and Python 3.3+, smoothing over language differences between the two versions.
pytest is a testing framework that lets you write test functions using plain assert statements and automatically discovers and runs them, with detailed failure reporting.
See also repo2rocrate · roc-validator · python-irodsclient · mlcroissant · python-olm · rdflib-jsonld · rdflib · cmeel-urdfdom · prefixcommons · typed-json-dataclass