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Integration

Use the integration block to configure how pipelines interact with an external system, such as Slack or Email, via input and message steps.

Like triggers, integrations require callback endpoints, so they only work in server-mode. When you run a pipeline in client-mode, notifications for input and message steps will only appear on the command line, regardless of your notifier and integration configuration. To send input and message requests to your integrations, you must run Flowpipe server!

Integrations are configuration resources, defined in configuration files (.fpc), not mod files(.fp). Here's why:

  • The settings are installation-specific and may contain secrets.
  • The settings are usually the same for all mods in a given installation.

Note that while the definition of the integration happens at the installation level, the instantiation is per Flowpipe process instance. If, for example, you run 2 separate flowpipe server instances on the same host, they will both share the same Slack integration definition, but each will create its own instance, with its own URL.

An integration is similar in many respects to a trigger:

  • It is loaded at mod start-up time and usually creates a public HTTP endpoint (the request_url).
  • There are multiple types, each with its own label eg (integration "slack" "my_slack), and the arguments vary by type.

Unlike a trigger, an integration does not initiate a pipeline but instead is referenced in a pipeline step to interact with an external system.

Request URL

Behind the scenes, each of these integrations has its own Request URL HTTP endpoint. The integration endpoints will receive responses in their native format and will perform service-specific tasks — for security, authentication, data transformation, etc — to extract the value from the response. The value will be passed as an attribute of the step so that it may be inspected by later steps.

The Request URL enables external system to connect to Flowpipe. To avoid reconfiguring that external system, it's important to maintain a stable URL. In order to generate a consistent but unguessable URL path, the URLs are generated by hashing the trigger name with a salt. The salt file is written to the Flowpipe install directory, in the internal subdirectory: ~/.flowpipe/internal/salt.

Base URL

The Request URL must be publicly accessible in order for the external user or system to respond. Flowpipe does not know the hostname portion of this URL, so you must provide it by setting the Base URL to a host that the recipient can route to. This may include the DNS or IP address of the system on which you are running Flowpipe, or it may be a reverse proxy such as ngrok. You can set the base URL via the FLOWPIPE_BASE_URL environment variable, the base_url workspace argument, or pass it via the --base-url argument to the flowpipe server command. Typically, it's simplest to set it in your default workspace:

workspace "default" {
  base_url      = "https://84c5df474.ngrok-free.dev"
}