Documentation

Disclaimer:
The flowd project is evolving rapidly and is currently in an active and heavy development phase. As a result, the documentation may not always match the current behavior of the codebase. We are actively working to stabilize the project and aim to reach a stable release as soon as possible.

flwd (pronounced “flowed”) is a small job engine that discovers scripts, enforces typed inputs, and runs them via CLI and HTTP with unified logs.

It is the reference implementation of FLOWD — Framework for Language-agnostic Orchestration of Workflows Distributed.

Naming & compatibility:
This project is not related to the NetFlow collector (flowd) by Damien Miller.
To avoid binary name collisions and respect that existing ecosystem, the runtime and CLI are called flwd in all commands, config files and packages. All documentation and packaging keep flwd clearly distinct, so both can safely coexist on the same machines.

What you’ll find here

This section collects user-facing guides for installing flwd, running your first jobs, and understanding the architecture and main components.

Where to start

Why Not “Just Bash or PowerShell”?
Why flwd exists on top of shells, and when to use the engine instead of raw scripts.
Getting Started
Clone, build flwd, initialise a workspace and run a “hello world” job.
Architecture Overview
High-level view of the engine, components and execution flow.
Quick Start
Fast path: list → plan → run a job, enable completion, try the TUI.
Quickstart (CLI)
Slightly deeper CLI tour: planning, runs, JSON output, inspecting history.

Runtime and usage

Serve Mode (HTTP + SSE)
Run flwd as a small HTTP server and call jobs remotely.
Shell Completions
Enable tab-completion for job names, flags and values.
Aliases & Intelligent Completion
Friendly names for tools and smarter completion hints.

Sources and packaging

Sources (Local, Git)
Load jobs from local directories and git repositories.
OCI Add-On Sources
Package jobs inside container images and expose them as sources.
Container Executor
Run jobs inside rootless containers with secure defaults.

Diagnostics

Troubleshooting
Common problems (container runtime, add-ons, sources, auth) and how to fix them.

Code repository: https://github.com/flowd-org/flowd

This site currently uses the local docs under content/docs/. When we are ready to import docs from the main code repository, we can mount the docs/ folder from github.com/flowd-org/flowd into this site via Hugo Modules.