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Core concepts
The handful of terms that show up everywhere in FlowRunner, and how they fit together. Skim this once and the rest of the documentation reads more easily.
The glossary
Workspace
A workspace is your account's home for everything you build. It holds your projects, your team members, your saved components, and your secrets. When you sign up you get a personal workspace automatically; you can create more and invite people into them to work as a team. The workspace is the boundary for access and billing — see Workspaces & teams.
Project
A project is one thing you are building — a website, a form, an API, or a mix. A project lives inside a workspace and contains a set of files organised in a directory tree, plus the components it uses and its version history.
File
A file is one buildable unit inside a project. Every file is one of three types:
| File type | What it is | Built in |
|---|---|---|
| Page / form | A visual document — a web page or a form — made of blocks and inputs. | The Designer |
| Flow | A graph of nodes that runs a process. | The flow canvas |
| Data | A stored dataset the project can read from. | — |
A brand-new project starts with a single flow file named main. You add pages, forms, and more flows from there.
Block
A block is a ready-made section you drop onto a page in the Designer — a hero banner, a pricing table, a testimonials strip, a contact form. Blocks are theme-aware, so restyling your theme restyles every block at once. See Blocks & page templates.
Node
A node is a single step in a flow — the automation equivalent of a block. Each node does one job: Start & End mark the entry and exit, If and Switch branch, ForEach loops, and HTTP, Email, MongoDB, Set, and Template do the work. You connect nodes with wires on the canvas. Browse them all in the node reference.
Trigger
A trigger is what starts a flow. FlowRunner supports three: an HTTP request to the flow's URL, a form submission, and a schedule that fires on a cron timetable. A flow always begins at a Start node; the trigger decides when that Start node runs.
Submission
A submission is one captured response to a form. Every submission is stored by default, so a published form never silently loses data. You read them in the responses inbox and export them to CSV. See Form submissions.
Publish
Publishing is the act of taking a page or form live. FlowRunner keeps a draft and a published version separately: you edit the draft freely, and the public only ever sees the last version you published. See Publishing overview.
Secret
A secret is a sensitive value — an API key, a database password — stored encrypted in your workspace's vault. Flows reference secrets by name with ${secrets.NAME} and the real value is resolved at run time, so it never lives in your project or your exported code. See Secrets.
How they relate
Read this top-down: a workspace contains projects, secrets, and members. A project contains files — pages built from blocks, and flows built from nodes. A trigger starts a flow; a form submission can forward to one; and both pages and flows draw on the workspace's secrets.
NOTE
A page and a flow are two file types in the same project, which is what makes end-to-end automation possible: a form on a page can hand its submission straight to a flow.