Actions

This page explains concepts associated with HCP Waypoint actions.

Background

HCP Waypoint actions provide a way for platform engineers to expose operations to developers. These actions can trigger external systems such as CI/CD workflows. Platform engineers create actions, configure actions, and assign them to HCP Waypoint templates. Applications created from templates in HCP Waypoint inherit the actions assigned to that template. Application developers can then run the inherited actions from their application.

Actions allow developers to run related application operations in a compliant manner as the configuration is maintained by the platform engineers. Actions can consist of operations such as building, deploying, rolling back, toggling feature flags, testing application endpoints, and sending notifications to external systems.

Workflow

Refer to How does HCP Waypoint work? for an overview of the workflow. The following steps describe the action creation and consumption model:

1. A platform engineer creates an action configuration that includes the URL endpoint, HTTP method, and other optional data such as headers, URL parameters, and request body data.

   Refer to Create and manage actions for instructions on how to complete this process.

2. A platform engineer assigns the action to one or more HCP Waypoint templates.

3. An application engineer selects a template with an action assignment to create a new application.

4. An application engineer runs the action from the application page.