Workflow Configurations

The building phase: how you design, assemble, and prepare workflows for production.

Overview

Workflow Configurations is where design happens. This section covers the complete lifecycle of creating workflows — from creating a Project to deploying your work to a live cluster.

Think of this as the blueprint phase. You're not running anything yet; you're defining what will run. The counterparts to this section are Operations (where you monitor live systems) and Assets (the reusable components that workflows are built from).

The Design-Time Lifecycle

Building workflows follows a predictable path:

Create a Project — The container for all your work
Configure Assets — Reusable components (Sources, Sinks, Formats, Services)
Build Workflows — Assemble processors into data pipelines
Deploy — Package and ship to a Reactive Engine cluster

Design-Time vs Runtime

Understanding this distinction is fundamental to using layline.io effectively:

Design-Time (this section)	Runtime (Operations)
What you're building — configurations, blueprints, assets	What's actually running — live workflows, active connections, flowing data
Static: you edit and save	Dynamic: changes in real-time
Lives in the Configuration Server	Lives on the Reactive Engine cluster
Think: IDE, editor, blueprint	Think: Dashboard, monitor, control panel

Example: You design a workflow that reads from an FTP source and writes to a database. That's design-time. When you deploy it and data starts flowing — that's runtime.

Most users spend their time in design-time when building new integrations. Once deployed, you switch to Operations to monitor, debug, and manage the live system.

Topics in This Section

Topic	Description
Getting Started	Installation, directory structure, and first steps after setup. Start here if you're new.
Workflow Configuration	Deep dive into Projects, Assets, Workflows, and inheritance. The comprehensive reference.
Workflow Deployment	How to package your work and deploy it to a cluster of Reactive Engines.
Server Config Settings	Reference for Configuration Server settings and preferences.

Getting Started Path

New to layline.io? Follow this sequence:

Read What is layline.io? — Understand the philosophy
Read Architecture Overview — Learn the system components
Follow Getting Started — Install and set up
Work through Workflow Configuration — Build your first workflow
Deploy with Workflow Deployment — Go live
Monitor in Operations — Run and observe

Key Concepts

Projects

A Project is the organizational container for your work. It holds:

Workflows — The data pipelines you design
Assets — Reusable components (Sources, Sinks, Formats, etc.)
Configuration — Environment-specific settings

Projects are stored on disk as a directory structure. You can import, export, and version-control them like any code project.

Workflows

A Workflow is a data pipeline — a connected graph of Processors that read, transform, and write data. Every workflow has:

Exactly one Input Processor (where data enters)
Zero or more Flow Processors (transformation logic)
One or more Output Processors (where data exits)

Assets

Assets are reusable building blocks. Instead of configuring a database connection in every workflow, you create a Service Asset once and reference it everywhere. Asset types include:

Sources & Sinks — Where data comes from and goes to
Formats — How data is structured (CSV, JSON, fixed-width, etc.)
Services — Reusable connections (databases, APIs, etc.)
Processors — Logic components used in workflows

Assets support inheritance: you can create a base asset with common settings, then derive specialized versions that override specific fields.

Deployment

Deployment is the act of moving your design-time work to a runtime environment. A Deployment includes:

Selected Workflows
Required Assets and Environments
Secrets and Extensions

Deployments are versioned and tagged. You can deploy directly to a cluster, or export to a file for later use.