Define automations

Naturally, your developer portal holds valuable information about your organization’s techstack, environments and dependencies. Port enables you to use this data to automate workflows and business logic, simplifying routine processes and making your organization more efficient and secure.

Automations in Port are triggered by events in your infrastructure, such as a new service being created, a cloud account being provisioned, or a new package being added to your software catalog. These events can be used to trigger a pre-defined backend running any logic, such as updating your software catalog, sending notifications, or provisioning new resources.

Port uses the same backend types for both automations and self-service actions.

Common automations

• Create a new incident in PagerDuty when CPU usage is greater than X%.
• Destroy an ephemeral environment when its TTL expires.
• Send a Slack message for each new alert.

How does it work?

Automations are comprised of two parts:

1. Trigger - An event in your software catalog that you want to act upon. This can be any one of the events defined here.
2. Backend - The logic that you want to execute when the trigger event occurs. This can be any one of the backends defined here. This part includes defining a payload that will be sent to your handler upon execution.

When an event occurs in your software catalog, Port will automatically trigger the associated backend, given that the automation is enabled.

By default, automations are disabled and can be used as drafts until ready to be activated. You can enable them by setting the publish field to true in their JSON definition.

Automation JSON structure

Automations are defined in JSON format. The JSON structure looks like this:

{
  "identifier": "unique_id",
  "title": "Title",
  "icon": "icon_identifier",
  "description": "automation description",
  "trigger": {
    "type": "automation",
    "event": {
      "type": "event_type",
      "blueprintIdentifier": "blueprint_id"
    },
    "condition": {
      "type": "JQ",
      "expressions": ["expression1", "expression2"],
      "combinator": "and"
    }
  },
  "invocationMethod": {
    "type": "WEBHOOK",
    "url": "https://example.com"
  },
  "publish": false
}

The table below describes the fields in the JSON structure (fields in bold are required):

Field	Description
identifier	The automation's unique identifier.
title	The automation's title.
icon	The automation's icon.
description	A description that can be used to explain the automation.
trigger	An object containing data about the automation's trigger. See Setup trigger for more information.
invocationMethod	An object containing data about the automation's invocation method. See Setup action for more information.
publish	A boolean value indicating whether the automation is enabled or disabled (false by default).

Define an automation

Automations are defined in the Automations page of your portal. Here you can create, edit, and delete automations, as well as enable or disable them.

1. Click on the + New automation button in the top-right corner. This will open a JSON form where you can define the automation's configuration.

2. Change the JSON configuration to match your desired automation:

   • Setup the trigger.
   • Define the backend that will be executed when the trigger event occurs.

3. Make sure to set the publish field to true if you want to enable the automation. When finished, click Save.

Examples

See some examples of automation definitions here.