Getting started

It's highly recommended to follow the tutorial, which introduces all the important features of LetsFlow one at a time.

While it's not necessary to be a star developer to create scenarios, the documentation assumes that readers have at least some basic programming skills.

Base concepts

The scenario models a process as a fine-state machine. The actors are persons, organizations, or systems that are allowed to participate in the process by performing actions. Which actions can be performed depends on the current state of the process. By executing an action, the process can transition to a different state.

A scenario is a blueprint of a process. In programming terms; the scenario is instantiated to create a process, similar to how a class is instantiated to create an object.

The scenario is formatted as YAML or JSON and can be validated using JSON Schema.

Workflow engine

The LetsFlow workflow engine is a Node.js service for storing and running processes, accessible through a REST API with JWT-based access control. It integrates with your backend via a message queue (recommended) or webhooks.

The typical way to use LetsFlow is by including the engine in a Docker setup with your other services. Alternatively, you can integrate LetsFlow directly into your backend using the core library, but this requires implementing access control, storage, and service notifications yourself.

Frontend integration

LetsFlow easily integrates into your frontend, regardless if you're using React, Angular, Vue, Svelte, or any other component framework. You’ll define reusable action schemas and build components that match these schemas.

The level of abstraction for actions is flexible: more concrete actions lead to simpler, more numerous components, while abstract actions result in fewer but more complex ones. As you get started, favor concrete actions to keep things manageable.

LetsFlow does not come with pre-built frontend components. The documentation shows how to build your own.