smithy-designer

Visual flow editor for the smithy RPA engine.

Drag nodes onto the canvas, connect them, configure tool selectors, and debug the flow step by step — in the browser, against the local smithy engine.

Features

• Visual canvas — nodes for control flow (start/end/if/loop), variables (set node), and every registered smithy tool; free-form graph editing with minimap and zoom
• Flowchart-standard shapes — diamonds for decisions/loops, stadium terminators, card-shaped tool nodes, red err output for error handling
• Step debugger — run the flow against real Windows UI: pause on nodes or breakpoints (right-click a node), step, inspect and edit variables from a REPL terminal
• SheRPA-style selectors — selector fields rendered as one XML-like string (<Element name="OK" control_type="Button"/>), editable inline or through an attribute modal; copy/paste selectors between blocks
• Typed variables — set node with auto / string / number / bool / json value types
• Labels — double-click any block to annotate it; labels persist in the flow file

Install

pip install smithy-designer

Requires Python 3.11+. For Windows UI-automation tools install the engine with its windows extra: pip install "smithy-engine[windows]".

Quick start

# build the UI once (Node 18+):
cd designer-web && npm install && npm run build && cd ..

# run the designer (opens the browser):
smithy-designer flow.json
# or:
python -m smithy_designer flow.json

The server binds to 127.0.0.1:8756 and serves the prebuilt bundle from designer-web/dist (or src/smithy_designer/static in installed packages).

Flow file

The flow document format is versioned — see the flow format contract in the smithy repo. Current version: v2.

Development

# backend
pip install -e ".[dev,tui]"
# frontend (vite dev server proxies /api to :8756)
cd designer-web && npm install && npm run dev
# in another terminal
smithy-designer flow.json

License

MIT — see LICENSE.