​Flow

A flow is a list of tasks. You create flows in Kestra to automate your processes.

A flow can have inputs.

Task

A task is a single action in a flow. A task can have properties, use flow inputs and other tasks outputs, perform an action, and produce an output.

There are two kinds of tasks in Kestra:

• Runnable Tasks
• Flowable Tasks

Runnable Task

Runnable Tasks handle computational work in the flow. For example, file system operations, API calls, database queries, etc. These tasks can be compute-intensive and are handled by workers.

By default, Kestra only includes a few Runnable Tasks. However, many of them are available as plugins, and if you use our default Docker image, plenty of them will already be included.

Flowable Task

Flowable Tasks only handle flow logic (branching, grouping, parallel processing, etc.) and start new tasks. For example, the Switch task decides the next task to run based on some inputs.

A Flowable Task is handled by executors and can be called very often. Because of that, these tasks cannot include intensive computations, unlike Runnable Tasks. Most of the common Flowable Tasks are available in the default Kestra installation.

Namespace

You can think of a namespace as a folder for your flows.

• Similarly to folders on your file system, namespaces can be used to organize flows into logical categories.
• And as filesystems, namespaces can be indefinitely nested. Using the dot . symbol, you can add hierarchical structure to your flow organization. This allows to separate not only environments, but also projects, teams and departments.

This way, your product, engineering, marketing, finance, and data teams can all use the same Kestra instance, while keeping their flows organized and separated. They all can have their own namespaces that belong to a parent namespace indicating the development or production environment.

A namespace is like a folder for flows. A namespace is composed of words and letters separated by .. The hierarchy depth for Namespaces is unlimited. Here are some examples of namespaces:

• projectOne
• com.projectTwo
• test.projectThree.folder

Namespaces are hierarchical, which means that for our previous example, the test.projectThree.folder1 namespace is inside the test.projectThree namespace.

Labels

Labels are key-value pairs that you can add to flows. Labels are used to organize flows and can be used to filter executions of any given flow from the UI.

Inputs

Inputs are parameters sent to a flow at execution time. It's important to note that inputs in Kestra are strongly typed.

The inputs can be declared as either optional or mandatory. If the flow has required inputs, you'll have to provide them before the execution of the flow.

Inputs can have validation rules that are enforced at execution time.

Inputs of type FILE will be uploaded to Kestra's internal storage and made available for all tasks.

Flow inputs can be seen in the Overview tab of the Execution page.

Outputs

Each task can produce an output that may contain multiple properties. This output is described in the plugin documentation task and can then be accessible by all the following tasks via variables.

Some outputs are of a special type and will be stored inside Kestra's internal storage. Successive tasks may still use them as Kestra will automatically make them available for all tasks.

Tasks outputs can be seen in the Outputs tab of the Execution page. If an output is a file from the internal storage, it will be available to download.

Revision

Changing the source of a flow will produce a new revision for the flow. The revision is an incremental number that will be updated each time you change the flow.

Internally, Kestra will track and manage all the revisions of the flow. Think of it as version control for your flows integrated inside Kestra.

You can access old revisions inside the Revisions tab of the Flows page.

Listeners

Listeners are special tasks that can listen to the current flow and launch tasks outside the flow, meaning launch tasks that will not be considered part of the flow.

The results of listeners will not change the execution status of the flow. Listeners are mainly used to send notifications or handle special behavior outside the primary flow.

Triggers

Triggers are a way to start a flow from external events. For example, a trigger might initiate a flow at a scheduled time or based on external events (webhooks, file creation, message in a broker, etc.).

Templates

Templates are lists of tasks that can be shared between flows. You can define a template and call it from other flows. Templates allow you to share a list of tasks and keep them updated without changing all flows that use them.