What is Flowdrome
Flowdrome is a workflow automation platform — in the family of n8n, Zapier and Power Automate — with one defining difference: your workflows run on your machines, not in somebody’s queue. Every host embeds the same engine the editor tests with; deploying a workflow pushes the exact document you tested to a machine you control, where its real triggers serve continuously.
A -drome is a place where things run: velodrome, aerodrome. Flowdrome is where workflows run.
The three pieces
| Piece | What it is | Where it runs |
|---|---|---|
| Studio | The visual editor: canvas, node library, live testing, single-step debugger, run history. Embedded in the Nucleus. | Your browser |
| Nucleus | The control plane: workflow registry, credentials vault, users & roles, host fleet, deployments, the approvals inbox. It manages everything and executes nothing. | One server (port 4800) |
| Hosts | The data plane: machines that execute workflows. A host serves its deployed workflows’ triggers on an embedded engine, keeps a run ledger, reports resource telemetry, and dials home to the Nucleus. | As many machines as you like (port 4801) |
One machine is enough to start. The Nucleus spawns and supervises a host of its own: a real
flowdrome-host process on port 4820, enrolled over loopback, listed in Hosts as Built-in
host with no join token to paste. So installing the Nucleus alone gives you a complete Flowdrome
— build a workflow, deploy it, call it. A separate host is for running workloads on more
machines than the one the Nucleus is on.
The split matters operationally: hosts keep executing if the Nucleus goes down, and management traffic never shares a process with workflow traffic. (The built-in host is the one exception — the Nucleus supervises it, so it starts and stops with the Nucleus.)
The lifecycle
- Build a workflow visually in Studio — 117 nodes, typed ports, live
validation, and
{{ }}expressions in any string field. - Test it from the editor against real services. Every run records the whole data envelope on every wire; you can single-step, inspect any node’s exact input and output, and retry a failed run from the node that broke.
- Deploy. One click pushes the same
flowdrome.workflow.v1document you tested — stamped with its saved version — to a host in your fleet, starting with the built-in one. The host’s embedded engine takes over serving the real triggers: HTTP, schedules, Telegram, Slack, WhatsApp, web chat, forms, WebSocket, and Table change feeds.
What’s in the box
- 117 nodes — triggers, flow control (if/switch/merge/loop/try/wait/approval/rate-limit), list tools, data shaping, SQL (Postgres/MySQL), S3, Redis, Mongo, FTP/FTPS, IMAP, RSS, CSV, crypto, email, Telegram, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, Google Sheets/Docs/Drive, Gmail, Notion, HubSpot, Outlook, message queues — and 13 AI nodes: agents with tools and memory, wired model carriers, a full RAG pipeline, guardrails, evals, transcription, speech and image generation. See the node reference — it is generated from the node registry itself.
- A credentials vault with OAuth2 connect flows (Google, Microsoft, Notion, HubSpot, and a generic provider). Deployed workflows lease secret values at run start; nothing is baked into deployments.
- Human-in-the-loop approvals — a workflow pauses at an approval gate until someone decides, and every pending gate across the fleet lands in one inbox.
- Observability — whole-envelope run data, per-node timings, bottleneck stats, host run ledgers and resource telemetry.
- Error handling — try frames, error-trigger recovery lanes, and stop-and-error.
- An AI that builds for you — the in-Studio AI Copilot edits the
workflow you have open from plain sentences, and every Nucleus serves the
Model Context Protocol at
/mcp, so Claude Code or Cursor can discover nodes, build, validate and test-run workflows on your instance — one URL, zero setup. - A real API — the Authoring REST API (and the mock/service
layer under
/api/mock/…) is implemented as workflows you can open on the canvas.
A note on names
One name runs through every technical surface: environment variables use the FLOWDROME_ prefix,
the two executables are flowdrome-nucleus and flowdrome-host, release artifacts are named
flowdrome-nucleus-… / flowdrome-host-… tarballs, and the workflow document format is
flowdrome.workflow.v1. Commands in these docs are verbatim — what you see is what runs.
Where next
- Install Flowdrome — Docker, a Proxmox LXC container, the live ISO appliance, a bare executable, or from source. A single Nucleus is a complete install.
- Your first workflow — a Telegram echo bot in five minutes.
- Node reference — every node, generated from the registry.
- Template gallery — ready-to-import workflows from the verified demo corpus.