after​Execution

Run tasks after the execution of the flow.

afterExecution tasks run after a flow execution is complete, capturing the final execution status.

afterExecution property

afterExecution is a block of tasks that run after a flow execution has completed. This allows you to run conditional tasks on SUCCESS or FAILED result. This is particularly useful for creating custom notifications and alerts. For example, you can combine the afterExecution component with the runIf task property to send out different Slack alerts depending on the task's final 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
    payload: |
      {
        "text": "{{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
    payload: |
      {
        "text": "Oh no, {{flow.namespace}}.{{flow.id}} failed!!!"
      }

afterExecution vs finally

afterExecution and finally are both end of flow components but have separate use cases.

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.

Considering the above, finally is best used to run cleanup operations at the end of a flow when the end state does not matter. Check out the finally documentation for more examples. When the end state does matter as a condition for followup actions, afterExecution captures the result for further operations.

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 }} # Execution RUNNING
  
  - id: fail
    type: io.kestra.plugin.core.execution.Fail

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

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

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