Quickstart

In this tutorial, you will learn how to build automation flows and integrate them with various apps. You will also learn how to customize the trigger for your automation. To demonstrate these concepts, we will walk you through the creation of a simple “Hello World” flow that sends a message to a Slack channel on an hourly basis.

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1. Create Demo account

To get started, visit Activepieces Demo Website and create an account.

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2. Create Hello World Flow

Once you have set up your account, you will be presented with the following screen. To create a new collection, click on the Start building button. This will also create your first flow, called Flow 1, within the collection.

A collection is like a folder that organizes your flows. To give your flow a more meaningful name, click on Untitled and change it to Hello World.

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3. Configure the trigger.

In order to send a message on an hourly basis, we need a scheduler that can trigger our flow at fixed time intervals. To set this up, click on the Empty Trigger and select the Schedule trigger from the “Core” menu.

We’ll now set the Schedule to run every hour by using this expression 0 0 * ? * * in the settings, as follows:

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4. Add a Slack piece.

While Trigger is what starts a flow, the actual logic of the flow happens in Pieces. Pieces perform a specific task or operation. They can be external services (Apps) or data processors (Helpers).

Since we would like to send a message to Slack, we will need a Slack piece.

Click on the + button below the trigger:

The Pieces panel will open. Go to the Apps tab and choose Slack.

App pieces have Actions. Actions are the different ways you could integrate with the App. Since we want to send a message, we’ll choose Send slack message action.

Depending on the action chosen, several fields need to be specified for the action to work.

For our case, we need to define Authentication with Slack first. Click on + New Authentication. You are then prompted to either use Activepieces slack app credentials or create your own developer app on Slack and add your credentials. For simplicity, choose to use Activepieces app and log in to Slack.

Next, select the desired channel to receive the message from the dropdown menu.

Last but not least, write down the text of the message. Eg: “Activepieces is cool!“.

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5. Test the flow.

Your flow is complete! It’s time to test it. Click on Test flow right above your flow.

Once the test is completed, you should receive the message in the Slack channel you chose and the builder will turn like this:

The check mark means the step ran successfully. You can click on any step and see its input and output.

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6. Publish the collection.

To enable your automation, click on the Publish button on the top of the screen. This will save the collection as a new version and automatically enable it. Your flow now is running in the background.

It’s official, you are ready to use Activepieces now 🎉