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Introducing Apps: Custom UIs for Kestra Workflows

December 4 2024News & Product Updates

Anna Geller

Product Lead

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OVERVIEW

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Kestra Core Team

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Kestra Core Team

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We’re excited to introduce Apps. With Apps, you can create custom user interfaces on top of your Kestra workflows. This feature makes it possible for anyone — not just technical users — to interact with your flows directly by submitting data, approving tasks, or viewing outputs, allowing you to build self-service applications for your data products and business processes.

What Are Apps

Apps act as frontend applications for your Kestra workflows. They allow end-users to interact with workflows through forms, output displays, markdown blocks, approval buttons, and other UI components, while Kestra flows handle all backend processing.

With Apps, you can:

• Create forms that submit data to workflows
• Build approval interfaces for paused workflows
• Display workflow outputs or logs, enabling non-technical stakeholders to validate data quality and request data they need for reporting and analytics in a self-serve manner.

In short, Apps let you turn any Kestra workflow into a user-facing application.

Why Use Apps

Workflows often require input from non-technical users who need to validate some data processing steps and decide on approval status. Traditionally, building such interfaces required a lot of effort—writing frontend code, connecting to APIs, validating user inputs, and handling security and permissions. Apps eliminate all that complexity. You can configure a custom UI for your workflows in just a few lines of declarative YAML configuration, and Kestra takes care of the rest.

Here are some examples of what you can do with Apps:

• Approval Workflows: approve or reject workflows that provision resources or validate data
• Data Requests: let stakeholders request datasets they need and download them directly from the app as a self-service
• Feedback Forms: collect feedback or handle signups for events
• IT Tickets: users can submit bug reports or feature requests, which are then routed to the appropriate team to resolve the issue.

Use Cases for Apps

Currently, Kestra supports two main use cases with Apps:

1. Form Submissions — users submit data to workflows by entering custom parameter values. When they press the Submit button, Kestra initiates a new workflow execution.
2. Approval Processes — users can approve or reject paused workflow executions. The workflow resumes or stops based on their decision.

Both of them are built using the Execution app type. Read more about available App types in our docs.

More types of apps are on the roadmap, such as apps to trigger actions using Kestra’s API. If you have a specific use case in mind, we’d love to hear about it!

Managing Access and Permissions

You can control who has access to your apps:

• Public Access: anyone with the app’s URL can use it
• Private Access: only authorized users with specific permissions can access the app

This flexibility makes Apps suitable for both internal tools and public-facing forms.

Getting Started with Apps

To create an app, start by designing a workflow in Kestra. For example, let’s create a workflow that allows users to request and download datasets:

id: get_data
namespace: company.team

inputs:
  - id: data
    displayName: Select data to download
    type: SELECT
    values: [customers, employees, products, stores, suppliers]
    defaults: customers

  - id: startDate
    displayName: Start date for your dataset
    type: DATE
    defaults: 2024-12-03

tasks:
  - id: extract
    type: io.kestra.plugin.core.http.Download
    uri: https://huggingface.co/datasets/kestra/datasets/resolve/main/ion/{{inputs.data}}.ion

outputs:
  - id: data
    type: FILE
    value: "{{outputs.extract.uri}}"

Save that flow. Then, go to the Apps page and click on + Create. Then, paste the app configuration shown below.

id: request_data_form
type: io.kestra.plugin.ee.apps.Execution
displayName: Form to request and download data
description: This app will request data and provide it for download.
namespace: company.team
flowId: get_data
access: PUBLIC
tags:
  - Reporting
  - Analytics

layout:
  - on: OPEN
    blocks:
      - type: io.kestra.plugin.ee.apps.core.blocks.Markdown
        content: |
          ## Request data
          Select the dataset you want to download.
      - type: io.kestra.plugin.ee.apps.execution.blocks.CreateExecutionForm
      - type: io.kestra.plugin.ee.apps.execution.blocks.CreateExecutionButton
        text: Submit

  - on: RUNNING
    blocks:
      - type: io.kestra.plugin.ee.apps.core.blocks.Markdown
        content: |
          ## Fetching your data...
          Don't close this window. The results will be displayed as soon as the processing is complete.

      - type: io.kestra.plugin.ee.apps.core.blocks.Loading
      - type: io.kestra.plugin.ee.apps.execution.blocks.Logs
      - type: io.kestra.plugin.ee.apps.execution.blocks.CancelExecutionButton
        text: Cancel request

  - on: SUCCESS
    blocks:
      - type: io.kestra.plugin.ee.apps.core.blocks.Markdown
        content: |
          ## Request processed successfully
          You requested the following dataset:

      - type: io.kestra.plugin.ee.apps.execution.blocks.Inputs

      - type: io.kestra.plugin.ee.apps.core.blocks.Alert
        style: SUCCESS
        showIcon: true
        content: Your data is ready for download!

      - type: io.kestra.plugin.ee.apps.execution.blocks.Outputs

      - type: io.kestra.plugin.ee.apps.core.blocks.Markdown
        content: Find more App examples in the linked repository

      - type: io.kestra.plugin.ee.apps.core.blocks.Button
        text: App examples
        url: https://github.com/kestra-io/enterprise-edition-examples
        style: INFO

      - type: io.kestra.plugin.ee.apps.core.blocks.Button
        text: Submit new request
        url: "{{ app.url }}"
        style: DEFAULT

      - type: io.kestra.plugin.ee.apps.core.blocks.RedirectTo
        delay: PT60S
        url: https://kestra.io/docs/

Click on View App to see it in action:

You should see a page with a form:

Fill out the form and click on Submit. Once processing is complete, you should see the results displayed.

The UI display and all actions performed by the app are configurable through blocks specified in the layout property.

You can share the App link with your end users, or they can access it directly from the Kestra UI by clicking on the View App button. If access is set to PUBLIC, your App link will be accessible by anyone in the world! 🌍

For more examples, check out the GitHub repository.

Next Steps

Apps open up a wide range of possibilities for automating user-facing processes. We’re excited to see how you’ll use them to build self-service applications for your data products and business processes. If you have ideas or feedback, we’d love to hear from you.

With Apps, you can make Kestra workflows accessible to everyone, regardless of their technical expertise. Try out Apps in the latest version of Kestra Enterprise Edition, and let us know what you think!