Actions in a nutshell

An Action is the minimal executable unit of a workflow.

Each action has a Type, which defines the way it behaves. An action does not control explicitly when to start (this is in the area of responsibility of the Strategy), but one can require a dependency, which is a reference to another action.

Status

Any action has a defined status, which is one of the following:

Status	Meaning
PENDING	The action is scheduled, but has not started yet.
RUNNING	The action is being executed.
SUCCESS	The action has finished without errors.
WARNING	The action has failed, but has low severity.
FAILURE	The action has failed.
SKIPPED	The action has either called a skip method or had a failed/skipped strict dependency.
OMITTED	The action is not scheduled (e.g. was disabled during the plan interaction phase).

Outcomes

During the execution, an action can report named values, which are called Outcomes and can later be reused as input for another actions. For an example of doing so, refer to the shell yield_outcome function.

Action types index

• echo - display messages
• shell - execute shell script
• subflow - run nested workflow
• loop - run an action within a loop