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Publishing as an App gives your workflow a clean, shareable interface. Only the parameters you’ve chosen to publish are visible to users, the rest of the canvas stays hidden. Apps can be productivity tools, games, tutors, recommendation engines, widgets, anything you can build with a workflow. For an overview of how Apps fit alongside Tools and Libraries, see Tools, Apps, and Libraries.

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Publishing an app

The App View sidebar is where you configure what your app looks like and publish it.
  1. Open the App View sidebar in one of these ways:
    • Click the Runchat menu in the top-left and select Preview App
    • Select a single node and click the puzzle piece next to its settings bar
    • Select multiple nodes and click the puzzle piece in the selection toolbar
  2. Use the Add Input picker to choose which parameters become editable fields in your app.
  3. Use the Add Output picker to choose which parameters are displayed as results.
  4. Click Publish at the bottom. A credit-per-run estimate appears next to the button. Subsequent publishes increment the version (Publish v2, v3, and so on).
Inputs and outputs you publish here also appear when the workflow is used as a Tool, the App and Tool publishing flows are unified.
The App View sidebar showing input and output pickers and the Publish button

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Choosing parameters

  • Input parameters in the App appear as editable fields. A published text input becomes a text field; a published number becomes a number input; a published image becomes an upload, and so on.
  • Output parameters are displayed as-is, formatted exactly as they appear in the editor. Outputs are read-only.
To remove a parameter from the App, hover it in the sidebar and click the X.

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Sharing an app

Once published, you can share the App URL with anyone. By default, every visit to your app URL creates a new instance, a unique copy of the app for that visitor. The instance ID is visible in the URL. This is what lets your apps remember per-visitor state, like chat history or game scores.
Want to build a multiplayer app where multiple visitors edit the same state? Share the same instance URL with both of them.

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Running the app

Users edit any visible inputs and click the run button. Runchat loads the workflow on the server, runs it with their inputs, and sends the result back. If your app uses long-running prompts or large libraries, check that the run time matches the patience of your audience.

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State

Apps keep track of the state of every node in the current Runchat. This is what lets you build apps that change over time, a task tracker that updates, a game with persistent scores, a chat that remembers previous turns. Note that nested Runchats do not track state, every time the user runs the app, any nested Tool node runs fresh with the current inputs.

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Embedding apps

Apps embed cleanly in third-party sites like Notion. Most platforms accept a paste of the app URL and embed it as an iframe. The Runchat docs themselves embed Runchat apps in several places.

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Tokens and accounts

Visitors need a Runchat account to run a published app. When a signed-in visitor runs the app, the run is billed to their account using their own credits and linked accounts. The same applies when the workflow is called via the Runchat API: the API key identifies the caller, and runs are billed to that caller’s account.

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Next steps