​
What are Triggers?

You could sit there and press “Run all” whenever you want your workflow to run, but in case you’ve got more interesting things to do, you can fire off your workflow with a trigger!

But they’re even more than a way to automatically start your workflows. Triggers allow you to incorporate your workflow into the flow of your business and into conversations with your customers.

For example, with the Email Trigger you could create an email service that generates reports based on requests in inbound emails. With the API Trigger, you could create a backend API service that determines if customers are eligible for a discount based on their purchase history. With the Scheduled Trigger, you could run a sales pipeline report every morning at 8am and send it to your sales team. Triggers make it possible to integrate workflows into everything you do.

​
Types of Triggers

There are several triggers available:

  1. Scheduled Triggers: Start your workflow on a schedule. Options are minutely (every 5 minutes), hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly.

  2. API Endpoint Triggers: Get an API endpoint with API Key that starts your workflow when called. Once you’ve got an API endpoint, you can integrate your workflow into other systems, use it as a backend service, or even call it from other workflows (which is great as a “tool” for AI agents). See documentation for API Triggers and also the slash Guide for Trigger Calls.

  3. Webhook Triggers: The webhook trigger performs the same function as the API trigger, but the API key is incorporated into a one-line URL that you can give to 3rd party services like Slack, Zoom, Linear, and others to call your Pinkfish workflow. The webhook endpoint performs the handshakes that are necessary by these services.

  4. Email Triggers: When you set up an email trigger, you’ll get a custom email address for your workflow. Any email sent to that address will start your workflow with the subject, body, and sender of the email as the input.

  5. SMS Triggers: Bonus trigger! If you have an account with Twilio (or similar SMS provider) you can use our SMS router to send SMS messages to your workflow. See SMS Triggers for more information.

​
Key Features of Triggers

​
For All Triggers:

  • Name: Each trigger has a name for easy identification.

  • Release Version: Triggers can be pointed to specific versions of your workflow. However, it’s easiest to just use the latest version. When you have it pointed to latest, it will always run the latest published version of your workflow.

​
Important Concepts

  • Publishing Requirement: You need to publish your Workflow before adding triggers. This ensures that triggers are associated with a specific, stable version of your Workflow.

  • Multiple Triggers: You can have multiple triggers for a single Workflow, allowing for various ways to initiate your workflow.