after​Execution

Run tasks after a flow execution completes.

afterExecution tasks run once a flow has finished, allowing you to act on the final execution status.

afterExecution property

afterExecution is a block of tasks that run after the flow ends. You can use it to run conditional tasks based on the final state, such as SUCCESS or FAILED. This is especially useful for custom notifications and alerts. For example, you can combine afterExecution with the runIf property to send different Slack messages depending on the execution state.

id: alerts_demo
namespace: company.team

tasks:
  - id: fail
    type: io.kestra.plugin.core.execution.Fail

afterExecution:
  - id: onSuccess
    runIf: "{{execution.state == 'SUCCESS'}}"
    type: io.kestra.plugin.notifications.slack.SlackIncomingWebhook
    url: https://hooks.slack.com/services/xxxxx
    messageText: "{{flow.namespace}}.{{flow.id}} finished successfully!"

  - id: onFailure
    runIf: "{{execution.state == 'FAILED'}}"
    type: io.kestra.plugin.notifications.slack.SlackIncomingWebhook
    url: https://hooks.slack.com/services/xxxxx
    messageText: "Oh no, {{flow.namespace}}.{{flow.id}} failed!!!"

afterExecution vs finally

afterExecution and finally are both end-of-flow constructs, but they serve different purposes.

The afterExecution property differs from the finally property because:

1. finally runs tasks at the end of the flow while the execution is still in a RUNNING state.
2. afterExecution runs tasks after the execution finishes in a terminal state like SUCCESS or FAILED.

Use finally for cleanup operations that should always run, regardless of the outcome. See the finally documentation for examples. When follow-up actions depend on the final state, use afterExecution to capture the result.

To demonstrate, take the following flow that uses both finally and afterExecution:

id: state_demo
namespace: company.team

tasks:
  - id: run
    type: io.kestra.plugin.core.log.Log
    message: Execution {{ execution.state }} # Will show RUNNING
  
  - id: fail
    type: io.kestra.plugin.core.execution.Fail

finally:
  - id: finally
    type: io.kestra.plugin.core.log.Log
    message: Execution {{ execution.state }} # Will show RUNNING

afterExecution:
  - id: afterExecution 
    type: io.kestra.plugin.core.log.Log
    message: Execution {{ execution.state }} # Will show FAILED

After executing the above, you can see that the finally task has a status of RUNNING while the afterExecution task says FAILED.