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Core Concepts

On top of its editors to build endpoints, flows and apps, Windmill comes with a set of features.

Windmill Features

Schema of Windmill architecture

Auto-generated UIs

Windmill creates auto-generated user interfaces for scripts and flows based on their parameters.

JSON Schema and Parsing

JSON Schemas are used for defining the input specification for scripts and flows, and specifying resource types.

Instant Preview & Testing

Windmill allows users to see and test what they are building directly from the editor, even before deployment.

Rich Display Rendering

The result renderer in Windmill supports rich display rendering, allowing you to customize the display format of your results.

Dependency Management & Imports

Windmill's strength lies in its ability to run scripts without having to manage a package.json directly.

Workflows as Code

Automate tasks and their flow with only code.

Draft and Deploy

Develop and cooperate in a structured way.

Persistent Storage & Databases

Ensure that your data is safely stored and easily accessible whenever required.

Windmill enables building fast, powerful, reliable, and easy-to-build data pipelines.

Roles and Permissions

Control access and manage permissions within your instance and workspaces.

Authentification

Windmill provides flexible authentication options to ensure secure access to the platform.

There are 5 ways to do error handling in Windmill.

Monitor Past and Future Runs

Get an aggregated view of past and future runs on your workspace.

Scheduling allows you to define schedules for Scripts and Flows, automatically running them at set frequencies.

Trigger scripts and flows from webhooks.

Variables and Secrets

Variables and Secrets are encrypted, dynamic values used for reusing information and securely passing sensitive data within scripts.

Resources and Resource Types

Resources are structured configurations and connections to third-party systems, with Resource Types defining the schema for each Resource.

Groups and Folders

Groups and Folders enable efficient permission management by grouping users with similar access levels.

Workers and Worker Groups

Worker Groups allow users to run scripts and flows on different machines with varying specifications.

Workspace Secret Encryption

When updating the encryption key of a workspace, all secrets will be re-encrypted with the new key and the previous key will be replaced by the new one.

Scripts and flows can be triggered by email messages sent to a specific email address.

Caching is used to cache the results of a script, flow, flow step or app inline scripts for a specified number of seconds.

Handling Files and Binary Data

In Windmill, JSON is the primary data format used for representing information. When working with binary data, such as files, they are represented as Base64 encoded strings.

A job represents a past, present or future `task` or `work` to be executed by a worker.

Collaboration in Windmill

Collaboration in Windmill is simplified through various features and workflows.

Have AI complete code on Windmill.

Windmill for Developers

Command-Line Interface

Interact with Windmill instances right from your terminal.

Local Development

Develop from various environments such as your terminal, VS Code, and JetBrains IDEs.

Version Control in Windmill

Sync your workspace to a git repository.

Deploy to prod using a staging workspace

Preinstall Binaries

Workers in Windmill can preinstall binaries. This allows them to execute these binaries in subprocesses or directly within bash.

React App Import

Import your own Apps in React.

Run Docker Containers

Windmill supports running any docker container through its bash integration.

Code Editor-Specific Features

Parameter Inference

Windmill ensures that the parameters passed to scripts, flows, and resources match the expected format and type.

Add Resources and Variables to Code

You can directly access Variables and Resources from the Code Editor.

Code Assistants

Windmill integrates code assistants into its code editor to provide language-specific suggestions, linting, formatting, and more.

Script-Specific Features

All details on Scripts can be found in the Script section.

You can attach additional functionalities to Scripts by specializing them into specific Script kinds.

main function's arguments can be given advanced settings that will affect the inputs' auto-generated UI and JSON Schema.

Scripts, when deployed, can have a parent script identified by its hash.

Worker Group Tag

Scripts can be assigned custom worker groups for efficient execution on different machines with varying specifications.

Concurrency Limit

The Concurrency Limit feature allows you to define concurrency limits for scripts and inline scripts within flows.

Running Services with Perpetual Scripts

Perpetual scripts restart upon ending unless canceled.

The Multiplayer feature allows you to collaborate with team members on scripts simultaneously.

Write Scripts on VS Code

The Windmill VS Code extension allows you to run your scripts and preview the output within VS Code.

Flow-Specific Features

All details on Flows can be found in the Flows section.

Triggering Flows

Trigger flows on-demand, by schedule or on external events.

Iterate quickly and get control on your flow testing.

AI-Generated Flows

Generate flows from prompts.

Split the execution of the flow based on a condition.

Iterate a series of tasks.

While loops execute a sequence of code indefinitely until the user cancels or a step set to Early Stop stops.

Configure a script to handle errors.

Trigger Scripts

Trigger scripts are designed to pull data from an external source and return all of the new items since the last run, without resorting to external webhooks.

Re-try a step in case of error.

Concurrency Limits

The Concurrency Limit feature allows you to define concurrency limits for scripts and inline scripts within flows.

Custom Timeout for Step

If the execution takes longer than the time limit, the execution of the step will be interrupted.

Priority for Steps

Prioritize a flow step in the execution queue.

Lifetime / Delete after Use

The logs, arguments and results of this flow step will be completely deleted from Windmill once the flow is complete.

Cache for Steps

Re-use a step's previous results.

Early Stop / Break

Stop early a flow based on a step's result.

Define a node at which the flow will return at for sync endpoints. The rest of the flow will continue asynchronously.

Suspend & Approval / Prompts

Suspend a flow until specific event(s) are received, such as approvals or cancellations.

Sleep / Delays in Flows

Executions within a flow can be suspended for a given time.

When a step is mocked, it will immediately return the mocked value without performing any computation.

App-Specific Features

All details on Apps can be found in the Apps section.

List of Components

Use prebuilt interface elements to display data, and manipulate or interact with it based on user actions.

Link your App to scripts and flows

Run any script or flow for your UI.

Customize the styling of your App according to your own graphical standards.

Apps can be accessed as a standalone app by anyone who has the secret URL

Schedule App Reports

Send a PDF or PNG preview of any app at a given schedule.

Group of Components

Components can be grouped within containers.

Import Custom React Components

Define components in React or Vanilla JS that interact with the rest of your app.

Workspace Default App

If configured, users who are operators in this workspace will be redirected to this app automatically when logging into this workspace.

Enterprise & Cloud Features

All details & features on Pricing page.

Our SLAs are designed to provide timely assistance and address any issues.

Windmill provides audit logs for every operation and action that has side-effects.

Deploy to Staging/Prod Web UI

Deploy items to another staging/prod workspace.

Connect a Windmill workspace to a Git repository to automatically commit and push scripts, flows and apps to the repository on each deploy.

Worker Groups Management UI

Manage Worker Groups through Windmill UI.

Concurrency Limits

The Concurrency Limits feature allows you to define concurrency limits for scripts, flows and inline scripts within flows.

S3 Distributed Dependency Cache

Leverage a global S3 cache to speed up Python dependency handling by storing and reusing pre-installed package.

OpenID Connect (OIDC)

Use Windmill's OIDC provider to authenticate from scripts to cloud providers and other APIs.

Configure Okta for both SAML and SCIM.

Dedicated Workers / High Throughput

Dedicated Workers are workers that are dedicated to a particular script.

Agent Workers are a 4th mode of execution of the Windmill binary, but instead of using MODE=worker, we use here MODE=agent.

Search any scripts, flows, resources, apps for a specific string similar to GitHub search.

Codebases & Bundles

Deploy scripts with any local relative imports as bundles.

The Global CSS Editor is designed to give styling and theming across your entire app.

Collaborate on scripts simultaneously.

Host your own Hub of scripts, flows, apps and resource types for your team.

White Labeling Windmill

Windmill offers white labeling capabilities, allowing you to embed and customize the Windmill platform to align with your brand.

Windmill React SDK

The Windmill React SDK provides a suite of tools and components to integrate Windmill applications into React-based projects.

Windmill Features
Windmill for Developers
Code Editor-Specific Features
Script-Specific Features
Flow-Specific Features
App-Specific Features
Enterprise & Cloud Features