- Building Flows
- Triggers
Building Flows
Triggers
Triggers control when your business automation will run
Each flow starts with a trigger. Triggers control when or how often your flow will run.
These are the different types of triggers that you can use on Activepieces:
Schedule Trigger
The Schedule trigger runs the flow regularly at the times you select.
Example schedules are:
- Run the flow every hour.
- Run the flow every day at 12 am.
- Run the flow every day at 12 am except on Monday.
We use Cron expressions to set the schedule. The following table explains the format we support:
| * | * | * | * | * | * |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| second (0-59) | minute (0-59) | hour (0 - 23) | day of the month (1 - 31) | month (1 - 12) | day of the week (0 - 6) |
Here are the most used special characters in Cron:
- * (any): Flow runs at every time unit (every minute, every hour, ..).
- - (range): Range of the time unit (from minute 5 to minute 10).
- , (values): Multiple value of time unit (on minute 5, 10 and 15).
- / (increments): Specify incremental values of the time unit (every 15 minutes).
Example expressions:
| Expression | Translation |
|---|---|
0 * * ? * * | Every minute |
0 0 * ? * * | Every hour |
0 0 0 ? * * | Every day at 12 am |
0 0 0/12 ? * * | Every 12 hours |
0 */5 * ? * MON-TUE | Every 5 minutes, Monday through Tuesday |
Webhook Trigger
The Webhook trigger assigns a URL to the flow and lets you hit it from an external system.
Use Webhook Triggers if you’d like to:
- Programmatically run the flow from another internal system.
- Listen to another app that supports registering webhooks.
- Manually run the flow by entering the webhook URL in the browser.
When you choose this trigger, you’ll find the URL in the Trigger Settings Panel. Copy and paste it wherever you want the flow to be triggered from.
App Trigger
The App Trigger runs the flow in response to data change on an external app like HubSpot or Stripe.
To see which apps support triggers, navigate to the Apps section in these docs.