Aerini Documentation

Aerini is a visual workflow automation app. You drag boxes called nodes onto a canvas, connect them in order, and Aerini runs them: by hand, on a schedule, or when a web request comes in. There's no cloud account and no subscription, and nothing about your workflows leaves your machine unless a node you add is the one doing it (an email node sending an email, an HTTP node calling an API you chose).

If you've used Zapier, Make, or n8n, the shape will feel familiar. The difference is where it runs: on your own computer or your own server, not a company's cloud.

The problem it solves

Most small, repetitive computer tasks ("check this every morning," "when X happens, do Y," "pull data from here and put it there") either get done by hand forever or need a developer to write and maintain a script for them. Aerini sits in between. You build the automation visually, without writing code, but it's still a real running program on infrastructure you control, not a black box in someone else's cloud.

Who it's for

• Non-technical automation builder. You've never opened a terminal and don't plan to. You install Aerini, drag some nodes onto the canvas, and get a working automation without touching code. This is the primary audience, and everything in Getting Started is written for you first.
• Self-hoster / ops person. You're comfortable with a terminal and want a workflow running 24/7 on a Linux box or in Docker, without the desktop app open. You care about flags, tokens, and hardening. See Server Deployment.
• Plugin / integration developer. You want to add a node type Aerini doesn't ship with, either as a .wasm plugin or by embedding Aerini's engine directly inside your own Rust program. See Plugin Authoring or Embedding aerini-engine.
• Aerini contributor. You want to build Aerini itself from source, add a new built-in node, or touch the codebase directly. See Architecture and the repository's CONTRIBUTING.md.

You don't need to know which of these you are before you start. Everyone begins in the same place: Installation.

What you can build

A workflow is nodes connected in an order, so anything you can break into "when this happens, do these steps" fits. In practice, people use Aerini for things like:

• A morning report: fetch numbers from an API, reshape them, and email or message the result.
• An alert: check something on a timer, and only notify someone when it looks wrong.
• A webhook receiver: accept a notification from GitHub or Stripe, and act on it.
• Small AI pipelines: prompt a model, transform its answer, and hand the result to another node.
• File and data shuffling: read files, change their contents, write the results somewhere else.

Nodes Reference lists every building block available. Skim it once you have a sense of what a node is (see Concepts), rather than reading it end to end now.

What Aerini can't do

The edges matter as much as the feature list.

• No hosted service. There's no Aerini cloud to sign up for. Something, your desktop or a server you run, has to be on for a scheduled or webhook-triggered workflow to fire.
• Single machine by design. A workflow runs wherever you started it. There's no built-in way to sync the same workflow across two machines or hand a run off between them.
• Doesn't expose your machine to the internet on its own. A Webhook node listens on a local port. If you want the outside world to reach it, you're responsible for exposing that port yourself, with a reverse proxy or a tunneling tool like cloudflared or ngrok.
• Pre-1.0. Aerini is currently version 0.4.1. The workflow file format and internal APIs are expected to keep changing until 1.0, when they'll be locked down under semantic versioning.
• Not a general data platform. No data warehouse, no built-in analytics, no massive-scale batch processing. It's an automation tool for individuals and small setups, not enterprise ETL infrastructure.

NOTE

Aerini collects no telemetry, analytics, or crash reports of any kind. The one exception: the app's own interface loads a font (Inter) from Google Fonts over HTTPS. Everything else is under your control. See Security for the full picture.

Two documents both called "Security"

There are two, and they cover different things.

• This site's Security explains Aerini's security model: how credentials are encrypted, what sandboxing plugins get, how server-side request forgery (SSRF) protection works, and how to harden a server deployment.
• The repository's root-level SECURITY.md is a vulnerability reporting process: where to report a security issue you've found, not a description of how the product works.

If you're deciding whether it's safe to expose a Webhook node to the internet, you want the first one.

Where to go next

If you want to...	Go to
Install Aerini	Installation
Build and run your first workflow	Getting Started
Understand the mental model before diving in	Concepts
Look up a term you don't recognize	Glossary
See every built-in node	Nodes Reference
Look up a keyboard shortcut	Keyboard Shortcuts
Wire node outputs into other nodes	Expressions
Store an API key or set up OAuth	Credentials
Run workflows on a schedule or via webhook	Background Runs
Roll back a workflow or compare it to an earlier save	Version History
Install or manage a .wasm plugin node	Plugins
Check on every workflow's status and memory use at once	Monitor
Chat with a workflow inside the desktop app	Chat Panel
Drop a chat widget onto a web page	Widget Embedding
See a worked example end to end	Examples
Fix a stuck or failed run	Troubleshooting
Run Aerini unattended on a server	Server Deployment
Update the desktop app, a server deployment, or an old workflow file	Updating
Understand how the pieces fit together internally	Architecture

Not sure where to start? Installation is the first page in the reading order everything else assumes.

Project status

Aerini is open source (AGPL-3.0), currently at version 0.4.1, pre-1.0, and actively developed. See the repository's README.md for license and contribution details.