Windmill.dev
docs.windmill.dev
docs.windmill.dev
I have my YC interview in 10 minutes and wanted to OSS it before. Agree it lacks a lot of polishing, but that will be done in about 2 weeks :)
JS/TS through Deno is coming in a week, I am currently working on a draft pull request for it.
Really happy to answer all the questions after my interview :)
(I host the demo on a small hetzner node, please be gentle to it, I will scale it up asap :))
PS: Since it's HN: The backend is all in Rust and the feature I am most proud of is automatic parameters and dependency inference for locking the dependency versions and generating the frontend of your app by analyzing the scripts using simple but surprisingly good heuristics :)
When did you submit your application? And when did they notify you about the interview?
You applied as a solo founder? That's a huge stamp of approval.
EDIT: Months away - sorry, I am flying on spirit atm.
We’re working on something similar at https://www.airplane.dev/ - same scripts-to-apps approach, schedules, trigger from Slack, etc.
Would love to chat sometime and compare notes if you’re up for it - ravi@airplane.dev
docusaurus + tailwindcss
def main(
...,
obj: dict = {"even": "dicts"},
my_list: list = ["or", "lists!"],
...
def foo(msgs=["hello"]):
print(msgs)
msgs.append("world")
foo() # prints ['hello']
foo() # prints ['hello', 'world']
foo() # prints ['hello', 'world', 'world']
You write code and they host it for you and provide a GUI around your code. It's like a crazier (in a good way) version of Kibana or Grafana or Metabase. In Kibana/Grafana/Metabase they provide a hosting platform for queries -- any queries within your internal eng team. This provides a hosting platform for scripts.
Whether or not that is exactly what they are trying to do, it's what I'm trying to do. What I wish I'd had at many prior companies.
I can't find them now while trying to search but it also reminds me of some tools I've seen that generate a GUI from a description of a tool's command line flags.
I suppose an example might be marketing has a DB of prospective customers and this would allow devs to quickly write scripts to clean it, apps to allow people to add to it and automated tasks to trigger events (eg. an email) based on certain metrics etc...
I guess it means being able to rapidly build fairly throwaway systems for internal use.
Better and simpler docs will be my sole focus for the following weeks + JS/TS support.
I have some diagrams and a step-by-step explanation on the README: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill
But the step-by-step is missing the concepts of variables and resources. If you have any feedback i'd be glad to hear it. I will opensource the website EOD too.
I've been automating a lot of tasks in multiple languages including Python with Azure Functions last few years, and I find this tool interesting to some of my use cases (though not immediately applicable because of existing cloud commitments, as such things go). I have at times thought that it would be great if I had a "Notebook view" of the Python Functions in Azure (preferably with strong git integration) to make some Data Scientist workflows easier. I've also had times where it might be nice when a cache needs to be "kicked" or a cleanup process run if I had a simple automated GUI for certain Function invocations or queue message drops that I could point a Business Analyst to.
In the first use case, I'm aware that Azure offers Notebook workspaces and there is some flow between building a test Notebook environment and then eventually migrating some of the code into a Functions app; but it is definitely not a streamlined all-in-one product and instead requires piecing together a bunch of semi-related ones and hopping back and forth between multiple different Azure resources. It also doesn't help that there seem to be fork between "general Notebook environments" and "ML Notebook environments" that seems more artificial than natural and complicates standing anything up in the first place. (Which is to say currently we aren't really using any of Azure's Notebook tools because they are too complicated and divorced from the use cases we need them. Every now and then I circle back around to explore them and the complexity just makes me angry.) This tool seems to already have some better ideas to approach that workflow and I'm curious to watch it, at the very least if it encourages Microsoft to up their game in competition with it.
As for the other use case, I know Azure Functions has almost all of the reflection metadata it needs to offer better tools here even in Python and Typescript already, but its Code/Test tool is definitely underpowered compared to the metadata it already has. It would be interesting to see if this new project provides competitive fire there.
I am not doing anything fancy for building the dockerfile: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill/blob/main/.github/...
Running the docker on the other hand require to pass a few env variables, among them the connection info to a PG instance. It also require to setup an user by editing directly the database and hashing by hand your password which is super inconvenient. I am working right now on making the process easier, did not expect self-host users so early.
At least, that’s always my first reaction when seeing something cool like this.
It's a heavy weight feature request but if I could lean on it in the way I lean on Prefect.io now for spinning up cloud workers on demand I'd use it for a lot more.
The UI to create/author flows seems slick, but I also think that for important flows, teams will want to be able to review changes to flows, make cross-cutting updates to several flows when a popular script or connector is updated, etc, in which case being able to view/edit/diff flows as code is quite valuable.
It has some resemblances with Airflow but one aim is to make it accessible to less technical users that can treat modules like blackbox. Similar to Zapier but the code is inspectable and editable at any point. At the core, it is a scheduler/orchestrator of script execution, so it's similar to Airflow in that sense, but the product is really not meant for the same usage.
I picked the name a bit randomly because it is retro and one of the first automation humans have created. I did not think too much about it but now I love it :)
However I've come across a few other similar products as well over the past year we've been building Airplane, and frequently things appear superficially similar but there's a difference in focus/use case/target customer/etc. For example, Airplane is focused on support, customer success or ops use cases (e.g. "I wrote a script to delete a user record / reset a 2fa token / etc, I can use Airplane to let the customer support team have access in a safe way"). Whereas I've seen other tools in this space target more of a "programmable Zapier" type use case (e.g. "For every new customer, I want to use a Python script to hit the Slack API and generate a custom notification.")
It'll be interesting to see how Windmill evolves over time.
[1] https://docs.retool.com/docs/building-a-workflow-with-the-re...
just poking fun, I understand that by no means should you wait for perfection before shipping. Congrats on getting to the front page!
I can make python scripts with infinite potential but to invoke them I have to put them behind a CLI, webhook, cron, and then orchestrate the data into these python scripts.
So this would be like the orchestration glue? Write a script, have it conform to a schema and then Windmill can orchestrate it's execution and input/output... with a nice UI for manual invokation?
Kick ass
Is there error handling? For example, from the github example, if the email sending fails for some reason can I either select the flow to continue/log or to stop entirely?
Can flows branch? For example after sending an email, can two flows be triggered like a tree and two flows off of each one of those ad infinitum (ad no resourcium)?
"Reduce tech debt by using this tool that might or might not be maintained in a few years to build a critical part of your business workflow" is a bold take I didn't think I'd see this year, but here we are.
- make it OSS
- build a community around it that can continue without the startup being around if needed
I have done the first, the second is my aim.
Thanks so much for releasing this useful and time saving software, you da man! Can't wait to see where this goes and I'd like to be part of the community.
Looks like those instructions don't exist yet.
Sql error: error returned from database: new row for relation "workspace_invite" violates check constraint "proper_email"Something like this would have been perfect.
I love python and JavaScript and think there's a whole world of automation focused jupyternotebook like tasks
The server version of it exists and I run it myself but that process is not documented yet. (Most people use it as a desktop app today.)
Couple of question-
- Are you building this as a pure Open Source project? I couldn't find the pricing section, and you have built it as an electron project. I am curious to know about your pricing strategy.
- Have you considered incorporating dbt or dbt like syntax query?
Long-term plan is that everything currently open source will always be open source (and there's quite a lot I believe). I'd like to release a hosted (paid) SaaS version for teams and an enterprise version also aimed at teams.
But the desktop app that exists now will always be free and open source. And I have no plans to stop adding new databases, file sources, and scripting languages as needed to the open source core.
> Have you considered incorporating dbt or dbt like syntax query?
I think it's already pretty close to this. You can import data within SQL queries (works with SQLite, MySQL, and PostgreSQL) using the `DM_getPanel` syntax. For everything else you can use Jinja-style templates [0]. This allows you to, for example, run a query to select IDs based on some filter in a PostgreSQL database and then pass those IDs to an Elasticsearch filter in another panel -- without writing any code.
[0] https://datastation.multiprocess.io/docs/latest/Panels/Macro...
Wishing you all the best luck!
I don't know if in practice this is really the same as what OP is providing and it's tied to slack which is abstractly bad. But if you're already working in ts and running slack it's very powerful for how easy it is.
The problem I needed to solve was how to enable employees outside of engineering to run scripts written by engineers, without them having to set up/interact with a full scripting environment like node. Particularly managing secrets and auth was a problem.
That slack "future" thing makes it very easy to drop a js or ts script into a new "workflow" and push it into the slack org. You can attach it to a slack modal or form, have auto-complete hints, just generally piggy-back on the slack UI that everyone is already familiar with.
It's basically deno with the slack UI over it from the user's perspective.
Again I don't know if this solves any problems people would be using windmill to solve, but if I were using windmill I'd probably be using it for something similar to this.