Tutorial: a support bot

In this tutorial you build one pipeline from scratch and grow it step by step. It is a support bot: it takes a ticket, works out what it is about, looks for an answer in a knowledge base, and either replies or hands the ticket to a person.

Every node type shows up once, at the point where you actually need it. By the end the graph looks like this:

The steps

Step	What you add	What you learn
1. A pipeline that runs	a stage, three nodes	how a stage and a pipeline fit together
2. Data between nodes	a second stage	the frame, arguments, outputs, types
3. Choosing the road	a condition and two endings	branching on a CEL expression
4. Two things at once	parallel branches and a switch	concurrency and n-way routing
5. When a node fails	retry and try/except	errors as part of the graph
6. A graph inside a node	a subpipeline	reusing a graph, isolating a frame
7. Watching it run	the editor and the debugger	stepping through a run

What you need

The core is enough for steps 1 to 6:

pip install stageflow-framework

The screenshots come from the StageFlow editor, a web page that draws and debugs a graph. It executes nothing itself: it talks to a backend that holds your stages. If you want to follow along in it, start the example backend:

git clone https://github.com/leo-need-more-coffee/stageflow-example
cd stageflow-example
pip install -r requirements.txt
python main.py                 # http://127.0.0.1:8765

and the editor next to it:

git clone https://github.com/leo-need-more-coffee/stageflow-ui
cd stageflow-ui
npm start                      # http://127.0.0.1:8080

Open http://127.0.0.1:8080, type the backend address on the connection screen, and use "File" → "Import JSON…" to open the pipeline of the step you are on.

The finished bot, its stages and its data files are in the example repository. The tutorial builds the same thing, one idea at a time.