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Kestra 0.17.0 brings a lightning-fast Code Editor, Autocompletion, improved Git sync, and Realtime Event Triggers ⚡️

June 4 2024News & Product Updates
Anna Geller

Anna Geller
OVERVIEW

Created by

Kestra Core Team

Managed by

Kestra Core Team
Kestra 0.17.0 brings a lightning-fast Code Editor, Autocompletion, improved Git sync, and Realtime Event Triggers ⚡️

Get to know our new powerful code editor, autocompletion for all templated expressions, more flexible Git integration, real-time event processing capabilities, new core orchestration tasks and improved manual approval. All this and more in Kestra 0.17.0!

We’re excited to announce Kestra 0.17.0. The highlights of this release include:

  • New Code Editor that unifies the editing experience for Namespace Files and Flows
  • Autocompletion for all templated expressions in the Code Editor and low-code UI forms
  • New Git integration that gives you even more control over your Git workflows by syncing flows and namespace files separately
  • Realtime Event Triggers empowering you to orchestrate business-critical events as they happen in real time
  • New orchestration capabilities enabled by the WaitFor task that continuously executes a list of tasks until a specific condition is met
  • Addition of inputs to a Pause task, allowing you to resume a paused workflow execution with custom input values, significantly simplifying human-in-the-loop processes
  • Improved naming conventions for better consistency.

Let’s dive in!

New Code Editor 💻

We’re introducing a brand-new, lightning-fast Code Editor which significantly improves the development experience as compared to our previous VS Code-based solution. The new editor is now the default editor for both Namespace Files and Flows, offering a unified development experience.

Why a New Code Editor?

Initially, the Namespace Files Editor was built on top of the FOSS version of VS Code to leverage its extensive ecosystem. However, this proved challenging for the following reasons:

  1. Difficult Onboarding: the embedded VS Code application was slow to load and difficult to get started with for new users.
  2. Limited Extensions: many popular VS Code extensions such as GitHub Copilot are not available in the FOSS version, significantly limiting its utility.
  3. UX Constraints: every interaction between the UI and VS Code had to be performed via an extension, making it impossible for us to create a truly seamless user experience.
  4. Design Constraints: VS Code didn’t allow us to customize the design to the extent we wanted, making it difficult to integrate it with the rest of the UI.

Benefits of the new Code Editor

The new Code Editor addresses all these pain points and offers a host of benefits:

  1. Better Performance: it loads lightning-fast! 🚀
  2. Streamlined Experience: one Editor to rule them all - no need to switch between different editors for Namespace Files and Flows.
  3. Improved Navigation: the new editor sidebar now displays only Namespace Files without mixing them with the flow code.
  4. Intuitive Design: the look-and-feel is more enjoyable, visually appealing and easier to get started with.
  5. Seamless Integration: a much better integration with the rest of the UI, e.g. you can now easily edit the flow code from its Execution’s page in a way that feels natural and intuitive.

In short, the new editor offers a fast, unified and user-friendly editing experience.

Autocompletion ☑️

Along with the new Code Editor, we’ve added Autocompletion for all templated expressions in the editor. This feature will help you write flows faster by suggesting variables, inputs, outputs and other expressions as you type.

Subflow Autocompletion

When you use the Subflow task, you’ll now also get autocompletion for subflows. Just add the subflow task, and start typing to see the suggestions for the namespace, flow ID and flow inputs.

Related to Autocompletion, we’ve added a printContext() function for debugging purposes. This new function will print the full Execution context, including all variables, inputs, outputs, and other execution metadata.

New improved Git tasks 🧑‍💻

With the release of Kestra 0.17.0, we are also introducing a fully redesigned Version Control integration, offering more flexibility. Here are the new Git tasks:

  • PushFlows: commit and push saved flows to a Git repository.
  • SyncFlows: sync flows from a Git branch to a Kestra namespace.
  • PushNamespaceFiles: commit and push namespace files to a Git repository.
  • SyncNamespaceFiles: sync namespace files from a Git branch to a Kestra namespace.

Capabilities of the New Git Integration

  1. Simplicity: nested namespaces now work the same way as nested folders on your computer, making it easy to version-control your code across multiple projects, teams and environments.
  2. Selective Git Pushes: the new tasks give you more control over what gets committed, e.g. you can now push only one or more specific flows to your chosen Git directories and branches.
  3. Seamlessly Integrated: you can combine the PushFlows and SyncFlows tasks together to create a complete Git workflow: push your flows from a development environment to a Git repository and then sync them back to your Kestra environment after they’ve been reviewed and merged to a production branch.
  4. Easily Testable: you can validate your Git workflows in a dry-run mode before committing and pushing your changes.

Push Flows to Git

The PushFlows task allows you to easily commit and push your saved flows to a Git repository. Check the following documentation and the video demonstration below to learn more about how you can use this task to automate your Git workflow.

Sync Flows from Git

The SyncFlows task automatically checks for changes in your Git branch and deploys them to your Kestra namespace(s), keeping your Kestra environment in sync with your Git repository.

It eliminates the need for CI/CD pipelines — you can use it to sync flows from Git to Kestra on a regular cadence (e.g. an hourly or daily Schedule trigger) or whenever changes are merged into a specified Git branch (e.g. a Webhook trigger).

Example: Scheduled Sync

Sync flows from a Git repository to a Kestra git namespace every hour:

id: sync_flows_from_git
namespace: release


tasks:
  - id: git
    type: io.kestra.plugin.git.SyncFlows
    gitDirectory: flows
    targetNamespace: git
    includeChildNamespaces: true # optional; by default, it's set to false to allow explicit definition
    delete: true # optional; by default, it's set to false to avoid destructive behavior
    url: https://github.com/anna-geller/flows
    branch: develop
    username: anna-geller
    password: "{{ secret('GITHUB_ACCESS_TOKEN') }}"
    dryRun: false


triggers:
  - id: hourly
    type: io.kestra.plugin.core.trigger.Schedule
    cron: "0 * * * *"

The PushNamespaceFiles and SyncNamespaceFiles tasks work analogically to the PushFlows and SyncFlows tasks, but applied to namespace files. Watch the videos below to see how you can use these tasks to manage your namespace files with Git.

These new tasks will supercharge your Git workflows, making it easier to version control your flows and namespace files.

Realtime triggers ⚡️

Kestra 0.17.0 introduces a concept of Realtime Event Triggers allowing you to react to events as they happen with millisecond latency.

Why Realtime Triggers?

Kestra has a concept of triggers that can listen to external events and start a workflow execution when the event occurs. Most of these triggers poll external systems for new events at regular intervals e.g. every second. This works well for data processing use cases. However, business-critical workflows often require reacting to events as they happen with millisecond latency and this is where Realtime Triggers come into play.

What are Realtime Triggers?

Realtime triggers listen to events in real time and start a workflow execution as soon as:

With this new feature, you can orchestrate business-critical processes and microservices in real time. Visit the Realtime Trigger documentation to learn more and check the video below to see it in action:

Human in the loop with Pause task

The Pause task now supports onResume inputs, allowing you to pause a workflow execution and resume it later with custom input values. This is particularly useful for human-in-the-loop processes where you need to collect additional information from a user before proceeding with the workflow.

Human-in-the-loop Workflow for Interactive AI Applications

An increasingly common use case for the manual approval processes is in AI applications where human intervention is required to validate the AI’s output. The video below demonstrates how you can automatically pause a workflow execution until the user resumes it with custom input values.

The new WaitFor orchestration pattern

Many workflows require performing some action until a certain condition is met, or waiting for a specific condition to be met before proceeding with the next tasks. Common use cases include:

  1. Blocking Calls for Job Status: to manage long-running jobs or external processes, you need to periodically check the status of these jobs, effectively blocking the next task runs until the job is completed.
  2. Dynamic Conditions from External APIs: workflows frequently depend on data or conditions retrieved from external APIs. You may need to poll these APIs until specific conditions are met, such as waiting for a dataset to be updated, a transaction to be confirmed, or a resource to become available.
  3. Scraping APIs and Webpages: when extracting data from APIs or webpages, the total number of pages or data size might not be known upfront. You might need to repeatedly fetch data until all pages have been scraped or a termination condition (like an empty response or a specific flag) is encountered.
  4. Waiting for Custom Events: to synchronize with external events, such as file uploads, database triggers, or user actions, Kestra supports triggers as a primary solution. However, often polling custom events/systems for status might be more involved, requiring patterns such as while-loops to wait for custom events before starting specific task runs.

To accommodate these use cases, Kestra 0.17.0 introduces the WaitFor task that will run a list of tasks repeatedly (every checkFrequency interval) until the expected condition is met. This task will create a separate task run attempt within each loop iteration and will mark the Execution as Paused during the “wait” period (the time between loop iterations).

Let’s see it in action!

The following example demonstrates a simple task that will check for a condition every 10 milliseconds until the counter reaches 10. The Log task will print the current iteration value to the console.

id: simple_counter
namespace: company.team


tasks:
  - id: loop_until_10
    type: io.kestra.plugin.core.flow.WaitFor
    condition: "{{ outputs.loop_until_10.iterationCount < 10 }}"
    tasks:
      - id: log_iteration
        type: io.kestra.plugin.core.log.Log
        message: "Current iteration: {{ outputs.loop_until_10.iterationCount }}"
    checkFrequency:
      interval: PT0.01S
      maxDuration: PT30S

Below is a more complex example where the WaitFor task polls an external API for a job status. The workflow will repeatedly call the API every second until the job status is finished. The Log task will print a message when the job is finished.

id: job_status
namespace: company.team


tasks:
  - id: block_until_finished
    type: io.kestra.plugin.core.flow.WaitFor
    # replace with the actual condition e.g. {{ outputs.poll.body.status != 'finished' }}
    condition: "{{ outputs.poll.code != 200 }}"
    tasks:
      - id: poll
        type: io.kestra.plugin.core.http.Request
        uri: https://kestra.io/api/mock
        method: GET
        contentType: application/json
    checkFrequency:
      interval: PT1S
      maxDuration: PT90S


  - id: continue
    type: io.kestra.plugin.core.log.Log
    message: the job finished, continuing downstream tasks!

UI enhancements 📊

New Getting-Started Experience

We’ve revamped the Guided Tour to help new users get started with Kestra. The new onboarding flow now allows you to choose the use case you’re interested in and guides you through the process of creating and running your first flow! 🚀

Check out the new Getting Started experience in the following video demo:

Improved Settings page

The Settings page has a new structure to make it easier to navigate and find the settings you need. The settings are now grouped into Theme Preferences, Date and Time Preferences as well as the Main Configuration settings.

ui_settings

New Plugin Catalog

The new plugin catalog shows all plugins available in your Kestra instance. You can search for any plugin category e.g. AWS, as well as for a specific plugin subgroup e.g. S3. Once you click on a plugin, you’ll be redirected to a full documentation page with all the details you need to start using it.

ui_plugins

Enhancements to the core 🫶

Java 21

Kestra now runs on Java 21. If you use Standalone Server, make sure to update your Java version to 21 before upgrading to Kestra 0.17.0 and beyond.

Array input

So far, the JSON input type allowed you to pass an array of objects. However, the contents of the array could be of any type and the only way to add validation to them would be to use nested inputs.

Kestra 0.17.0 adds a new ARRAY input type that allows you to specify the type of the array elements using the itemType property.

This enhancement is particularly useful when you want the end user triggering the workflow to provide multiple values of a specific type, e.g. a list of integers, strings, booleans, datetimes, etc. You can provide the default values as a JSON array or as a YAML list — both are supported.

id: array_demo
namespace: company.team


inputs:
  - id: my_numbers_json_list
    type: ARRAY
    itemType: INT
    defaults: [1, 2, 3]


  - id: my_numbers_yaml_list
    type: ARRAY
    itemType: INT
    defaults:
      - 1
      - 2
      - 3


tasks:
  - id: print_status
    type: io.kestra.plugin.core.log.Log
    message: received inputs {{ inputs }}

Renaming

We’ve refactored several core abstractions to ensure consistent and intuitive naming. Many core tasks, triggers and conditions have been renamed. For example:

  • taskDefaults are now pluginDefaults to highlight that you can set default values for all plugins (including triggers, task runners and more), not just tasks
  • the critical HTTP tasks are now part of the core plugin rather than the file-system plugin.

All of these are non-breaking changes as we leverage aliases for backward compatibility. You will see a friendly warning in the UI code editor if you use the old names.

renamed-core-plugins

It’s worth taking a couple of minutes to rename those in your flows to future-proof your code.

Improved serialization of JSON objects

Before this release, we serialized JSON objects with a NON_DEFAULT strategy, meaning that only properties without default values were included in the serialized JSON document. This was done to save space in the database and optimize network bandwidth. However, this wasn’t user-friendly. Kestra 0.17.0 changed the serialization strategy to improve handling of null values and empty JSON objects.

Let’s look at an example to make it more concrete:

id: my_flow
namespace: company.team


inputs:
  - id: my_string
    type: STRING
    defaults: null
    required: false


tasks:
  - id: print_input
    type: io.kestra.core.tasks.log.Log
    message: "{{ inputs.my_string }}" # workaround until 0.17.0: "{{ inputs.my_string ?? null }}"

Running the above workflow in Kestra < 0.17.0 would result in the following error:

Missing variable: 'inputs' on '{{ inputs.my_string }}' at line 1
Root attribute [inputs] does not exist or can not be accessed and strict variables is set to true. ({{ inputs.my_string }}:1)

The my_string input was not serialized. In Kestra 0.17.0, the expression {{ inputs.my_string }} will no longer generate an error and will resolve to null, even without passing a default value:

id: my_flow
namespace: copmany.team


inputs:
  - id: my_string
    type: STRING
    required: false


tasks:
  - id: print_input
    type: io.kestra.plugin.core.log.Log
    message: "{{ inputs.my_string }}"

Outputs of a flow trigger

Flow trigger now has outputs of a flow attached to the trigger object: {{ trigger.outputs }}. This means that outputs generated by a certain flow can be consumed by many other flows at the same time, allowing a fan-out event-based processing pattern.

New OutputValues task

This task is useful when you need to output multiple values from a task. It’s especially helpful when you need to apply some complex Pebble transformations before passing the values to other tasks.

id: output_values_demo
namespace: company.team


inputs:
  - id: user
    type: STRING
    description: Enter your name


tasks:
  - id: first_task
    type: io.kestra.plugin.core.output.OutputValues
    values:
      output1: "{{ 'thrilled and excited' | title }}"
      output2: "{{ 'you' | capitalize }}"


  - id: hello_world
    type: io.kestra.plugin.core.log.Log
    message: |
      Welcome to kestra, {{ inputs.user }}!
      We are {{ outputs.first_task.values.output1}} to have {{ outputs.first_task.values.output2}} here!

New Pebble filter startsWith()

There is a new Pebble filter called startsWith() that returns true if the input string starts with the specified prefix. This filter is useful for string comparisons and conditional logic in your workflows.

id: starts_with_demo
namespace: company.team


inputs:
  - id: myvalue
    type: STRING
    defaults: "hello world!"


tasks:
  - id: log_true
    type: io.kestra.plugin.core.log.Log
    message: "{{ inputs.myvalue | startsWith('hello') }}"


  - id: log_false
    type: io.kestra.plugin.core.log.Log
    message: "{{ inputs.myvalue | startsWith('Hello') }}"

Enterprise Edition improvements 💼

Default roles

You can now configure a default role that will be assumed by new users joining your Kestra instance or tenant. To do that, you need to define the default role in the security section of your configuration file as follows:

kestra:
  security:
    default-role:
      name: Editor
      description: Default Editor role
      permissions:
        FLOW: ["CREATE", "READ", "UPDATE", "DELETE"]
        EXECUTION:
          - CREATE
          - READ
          - UPDATE
          - DELETE

The permissions property is a map with a Permission as a key (e.g. FLOW, EXECUTION, NAMESPACE, SECRET, etc.) and a list of allowed Actions (CREATE, READ, UPDATE, DELETE) as a value.

If the default role doesn’t exist yet, it will be created automatically when you start Kestra. From then on, the default role will be assigned to new users joining your Kestra instance or tenant.

Customizable tenant dropdown

You can now customize the tenant dropdown with a custom logo. This is especially useful if you’re running a multi-tenant Kestra instance with one tenant per customer, company or environment.

To upload a custom logo, go to the Tenants page and navigate to the Tenant for which you want to add a new icon. Click on the Edit button and upload the logo in the Logo field.

logo_upload

Here is how it looks like on the Cluster Dashboard page:

logo_display

Allowed namespaces

We’ve added a new feature that allows you to explicitly declare which namespaces are allowed to trigger flows and other resources for any given namespace.

When you navigate to any Namespace and go to the Edit tab, you can explicitly configure which namespaces are allowed to access it. By default, all namespaces are allowed.

allowed-namespaces

However, you can restrict that access if you want only specific namespaces (or no namespace at all) to trigger its corresponding resources.

Improved Execution page

You can now execute a flow from the Executions page. Thanks to this change, you can allow external partners or users to Execute some workflows without granting them access to read the workflow information (i.e. only EXECUTION CREATE permission is required, you no longer need the FLOW READ permission).

Plugin Enhancements 🧩

Apart from many Realtime Triggers, we’ve made several improvements to our plugins, including:

  • The Debezium plugin has been upgraded to be compatible with Debezium 2.x
  • We’ve added a new MySQL BatchInsert task that allows you to insert multiple records into a MySQL database in a single transaction
  • We’ve improved the output of Downloads tasks to make it easier to pass data between Downloads and Script tasks. Here is an example showing the new improved way of passing downloaded files to the Script task:
id: process_files
namespace: company.team


tasks:
  - id: download
    type: io.kestra.plugin.aws.s3.Downloads
    accessKeyId: abc123
    secretKeyId: xyz987
    region: us-east-1
    bucket: kestra-us
    prefix: sales/
    action: NONE


  - id: transform
    inputFiles: "{{ outputs.download.objects }}"
    type: io.kestra.plugin.scripts.shell.Commands
    taskRunner:
      type: io.kestra.plugin.core.runner.Process
    commands:
      - ls -R .

Task runner improvements 🏃

Task runners, introduced in Kestra 0.16.0, have been further improved in Kestra 0.17.0. Here are some of the enhancements:

  • When an execution is manually killed by the user, the task runner infrastructure is now automatically terminated to avoid unnecessary costs.
  • Each cloud-based Batch task runner now supports a configurable completionCheckInterval by default set to 5 seconds. This interval defines how often the task runner checks for the completion of the Batch job. You can adjust this interval if you need more frequent checks for the completion of the Batch job, or if you need to set it to a higher value to reduce the number of API calls (e.g. in case of rate limits).
  • We now ensure that the timeout property defined in a Kestra task is propagated to a timeout of a cloud container (AWS/Azure/Google Batch Script Runners) issue.

Deprecations 🧹

We’ve deprecated LocalFiles and outputDir in Kestra 0.17.0. Here is why:

  1. outputDir: the {{ outputDir }} expression has been deprecated due to overlapping functionality available through the outputFiles property which is more flexible.
  2. LocalFiles: the LocalFiles feature was initially introduced to allow injecting additional files into the script task’s WorkingDirectory. However, this feature was confusing as there is nothing local about these files, and with the introduction of inputFiles to the WorkingDirectory, it became redundant. We recommend using the inputFiles property instead of LocalFiles to inject files into the script task’s WorkingDirectory. The example below demonstrates how to do that:
id: apiJSONtoMongoDB
namespace: company.team


tasks:
- id: wdir
  type: io.kestra.plugin.core.flow.WorkingDirectory
  outputFiles:
    - output.json
  inputFiles:
    query.sql: |
      SELECT sum(total) as total, avg(quantity) as avg_quantity
      FROM sales;
  tasks:
    - id: inlineScript
      type: io.kestra.plugin.scripts.python.Script
      taskRunner:
        type: io.kestra.plugin.scripts.runner.docker.Docker
      containerImage: python:3.11-slim
      beforeCommands:
        - pip install requests kestra > /dev/null
      warningOnStdErr: false
      script: |
        import requests
        import json
        from kestra import Kestra


        with open('query.sql', 'r') as input_file:
            sql = input_file.read()


        response = requests.get('https://api.github.com')
        data = response.json()


        with open('output.json', 'w') as output_file:
            json.dump(data, output_file)


        Kestra.outputs({'receivedSQL': sql, 'status': response.status_code})


- id: loadToMongoDB
  type: io.kestra.plugin.mongodb.Load
  connection:
    uri: mongodb://host.docker.internal:27017/
  database: local
  collection: github
  from: "{{ outputs.wdir.uris['output.json'] }}"

Next steps

This post covered new features and enhancements added in Kestra 0.17.0. Which of them are your favorites? What should we add next? Your feedback is always appreciated.

If you have any questions, reach out via Slack or open a GitHub issue.

If you like the project, give us a GitHub star and join the community.

OVERVIEW

Created by

Kestra Core Team

Managed by

Kestra Core Team

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