Zapp::Guides - Introducing Zapp
version 0.005
Zapp is a graphical workflow builder. Zapp provides a UI for building parameterized workflows (plans), and provides a UI for end-users to run those jobs and see the results.
The user that is running plans and examining results should have an intuitive, safe experience. An untrained user should be able to run plans to perform the tasks they need.
Analysts or domain experts should be able to start building plans with minimal training. Formulas resemble Microsoft Excel, a well-known, commonly-used development environment.
Developers should have the power to create new tasks that can be added to plans, as well as custom types to handle user input, and triggers (future development) which can automatically run jobs. Specialized job types can ask for input from a user.
Analysts should be able to configure automations (using triggers) which respond to events from other applications (like Slack, JIRA, or BitBucket). This can be used for release approval workflows or continuous integration (CI) jobs (future development).
Scheduled jobs and maintenance tasks keep the business running. Zapp can provide users with a view of which tasks run, when they run, and what they did. Jobs can be stopped and started if necessary. When a job fails, the user can choose to restart it from a particular point.
Runbooks are documentation for common operations tasks. Zapp's goal is to turn that documentation into automation. Even extraordinary operations tasks should be safe operations tasks: Reviews and approval processes take time, and time is critical when the application is down.
To run the Zapp web application, use the zapp daemon command:
zapp daemon
$ zapp daemon Web application available at http://127.0.0.1:3000
To run the job runner, use the zapp minion worker command:
zapp minion worker
$ zapp minion worker
Mojolicious::Plugin::Minion::Admin
Doug Bell <preaction@cpan.org>
This software is copyright (c) 2021 by Doug Bell.
This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.
To install Zapp, copy and paste the appropriate command in to your terminal.
cpanm
cpanm Zapp
CPAN shell
perl -MCPAN -e shell install Zapp
For more information on module installation, please visit the detailed CPAN module installation guide.