User Guide

User Guide

Core concepts and usage guides for Flowbot's orchestration engines.

Contents

  • Homelab App Discovery — Automatic API endpoint and auth mechanism discovery via labels and runtime probes
  • MCP — Inbound /mcp server for Cursor/Claude and outbound MCP servers as chat-agent tools
  • Homelab image update checks — Digest inspection, homelab.image.update_available, and the notify blueprint
  • Capability Webhooks — Provider inbound webhooks (/webhook/provider/*), paths, and signature / token auth
  • Pipeline Engine — Event-driven multi-step automation with retry and checkpointing
  • Pipeline Blueprints — Parameterized pipeline templates, official catalog, and import
  • Pipeline Template Engine — Go text/template-based parameter rendering with conditionals, loops, and FuncMap
  • Workflow Engine — YAML-defined task DAGs with capability invocation, shell commands, Docker, and remote machines
  • Notifications — Multi-channel notification configuration (Slack, Pushover, ntfy, Message Pusher, inapp)
  • Notification Gateway — Template-based notification rendering, Redis-backed throttling, aggregation, and mute/DND rules

Concepts

The Homelab App Discovery system provides automatic identification of what each
self-hosted app exposes: capability type, API endpoints, and authentication mechanism.
It uses docker-compose labels for deterministic discovery and optional HTTP probes for
runtime validation.

Flowbot operates three runtime engines plus named functions:

  1. Pipelines react to DataEvent messages published via Redis Stream. Each pipeline consists of a trigger and ordered steps that invoke capability operations.

  2. Workflows execute task DAGs defined in YAML. Tasks can invoke capabilities, run Docker containers, execute shell commands, or connect to remote machines.

  3. Named functions (FaaS) publish pure transform versions invoked via capability or HTTP.

  4. Notifications deliver messages across multiple channels using a unified provider interface.

REST for functions, pipeline, and workflow is mounted under one module: /service/automate/{functions,pipeline,workflow} (internal/modules/automate). See merge note.

For architecture details, see Architecture.