Creating a Workflow

Prerequisites

To begin creating workflows, you must first enable the GitHub integration.

How to create a workflow

To create a new workflow, first navigate to the Workflows panel and click the Create Workflow button.

After clicking Create Workflow, you will be prompted to input some information about your workflow. This information includes a name, a description, and optionally an email address and a slack channel. These optional inputs are for notifications. Learn more about our Slack integration.

After clicking Save, you will be prompted with the Workflow editor. If you change your mind about the inputs you configured before, you can always click Configure at the top to redefine those values.

In the space above, you will find a graph representation of your workflow wherein each node (the rounded rectangle) represents a step in the workflow's execution. The workflow execution moves from left to right until completion. For more information about the anatomy of a workflow, consult the Workflow Components reference.

Configuring steps

Clicking any of the steps will cause its configurations to appear below. Details shows the most basic facts about a step, the most impactful of which being the type. The type of step indicates what sort of processing will done during the execution of that step. For a complete breakdown of what each type of step does, consult the Steps reference.

Upon selecting a type, you will see another configuration box for that particular task type. See the image below depicting configurations for a deploy step.

In addition to type, you can also set a name and timeout for each step. The timeout represents a maximum duration for the step's execution. On every step except the first step, you can also set the depends on property which specifies where lines (edges) should be drawn in the graph. A line between steps A and B indicate that step B will follow step A.

Creating new Steps

There are three ways to create new steps in a workflow. Firstly, you can create a step off an existing step. Clicking the + sign on a step A will create a new step that depends on A.

You can also create steps between existing steps. Hovering your cursor over a line in the graph will cause two buttons to appear which both add steps but in different ways.

The button on the left sometimes called fork will create a new step C that depends on step A and leave step B unchanged as shown below.

The button on the right (the + sign) will create a new step C that depends on A, and update B to depend upon C as shown below.

Finalizing configurations

When you're satisfied with your workflow, you can click the Create Workflow button to save your workflow. You'll be taken to the details page. You'll learn more about this page in the next chapter.