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Build a flow visually

For the concept, see Flows; this recipe walks building one in the Kapi Desktop editor instead of writing YAML by hand.

Goal: assemble a multi-step flow — say recycle → translate → qa — by dragging tools onto a canvas, configuring each in a form, and running it against your content without leaving the app.

Outdated wording

The narration uses terminology that has since been retired. The interface and the behaviour shown are unchanged.

Video — retargeting needed

This clip is reused from the Kapi Desktop tour, where it showed flow composition as general orientation. TODO: re-record (or trim) it to tell this recipe's story — adding tools to the canvas, configuring one step, and running the flow against content — and drop the tour framing. Scene scripts: web/walkthroughs/.

Steps​

  1. Open the flow editor. From a project, open Flows and create a new flow (or edit an existing one). The canvas shows the ordered steps; the palette lists every tool the project's plugins provide.
  2. Add tools. Drag a tool from the palette onto the canvas. The editor places it in reading order and shows what each step consumes and produces, so incompatible orderings are obvious before you run.
  3. Configure each step. Select a step to open its config form — the same parameters as the Tool reference, rendered as inputs with their defaults. No YAML, no remembering flag names.
  4. Run it. Press Run and pick the content to run against. The runner streams per-file progress; output lands in the project store, ready to merge out.
  5. Save. The flow is written to the project's kapi.yaml recipe (or .kapi/flows/), so it is versioned and runs identically from the kapi run CLI.

Why the desktop​

The editor makes a flow's shape legible — the order of steps, what each one needs, and where it writes — and runs it live while you tune the configuration. The result is an ordinary recipe flow: nothing in the file is desktop-specific, so the same flow runs in CI from the command line.

Next​