Trigger Workflows using Pub/Sub messages (gcloud CLI)

Standard

This quickstart shows you how to execute a workflow using an Eventarc trigger that receives events using Pub/Sub. The trigger executes the workflow by passing events delivered through Pub/Sub as runtime arguments to a destination workflow.

In this quickstart, you will:

Use Workflows to create and deploy a workflow that decodes and returns Pub/Sub messages.
Create an Eventarc trigger that connects a Pub/Sub topic to a Workflows event receiver.
Publish a message to the Pub/Sub topic to generate an event. This event is passed as a runtime argument to the destination workflow.
View the Pub/Sub message as a result of the workflow execution.

Before you begin

Make sure that you have access to this feature by requesting to have your project added to private previews for Google Cloud Workflows.

Sign in to your Google Cloud account. If you're new to Google Cloud, create an account to evaluate how our products perform in real-world scenarios. New customers also get $300 in free credits to run, test, and deploy workloads.

Install the Google Cloud CLI.

To initialize the gcloud CLI, run the following command:

gcloud init

Create or select a Google Cloud project.

Create a Google Cloud project:
```
gcloud projects create PROJECT_ID
```
Replace PROJECT_ID with a name for the Google Cloud project you are creating.
Select the Google Cloud project that you created:
```
gcloud config set project PROJECT_ID
```
Replace PROJECT_ID with your Google Cloud project name.

Make sure that billing is enabled for your Google Cloud project.

Install the Google Cloud CLI.

To initialize the gcloud CLI, run the following command:

gcloud init

Create or select a Google Cloud project.

Create a Google Cloud project:
```
gcloud projects create PROJECT_ID
```
Replace PROJECT_ID with a name for the Google Cloud project you are creating.
Select the Google Cloud project that you created:
```
gcloud config set project PROJECT_ID
```
Replace PROJECT_ID with your Google Cloud project name.

Make sure that billing is enabled for your Google Cloud project.

Update gcloud components:
```
gcloud components update
```

Enable the Compute Engine, Eventarc, Pub/Sub, and Workflows APIs.

gcloud services enable \
compute.googleapis.com \
eventarc.googleapis.com \
pubsub.googleapis.com \
workflows.googleapis.com \
workflowexecutions.googleapis.com

Set the configuration variables used in this tutorial:

export WORKFLOW_LOCATION=us-central1
export TRIGGER_LOCATION=us-central1
export PROJECT_ID=PROJECT_ID
gcloud config set project ${PROJECT_ID}
gcloud config set workflows/location ${WORKFLOW_LOCATION}
gcloud config set eventarc/location ${TRIGGER_LOCATION}

If you are the project creator, you are granted the basic Owner role (roles/owner). By default, this Identity and Access Management (IAM) role includes the permissions necessary for full access to most Google Cloud resources and you can skip this step.

If you are not the project creator, required permissions must be granted on the project to the appropriate principal. For example, a principal can be a Google Account (for end users) or a service account (for applications and compute workloads). For more information, see the Roles and permissions page for your event destination.
Required permissions

To get the permissions that you need to complete this quickstart, ask your administrator to grant you the following IAM roles on your project:
- Eventarc Admin (roles/eventarc.admin)
- Logs View Accessor (roles/logging.viewAccessor)
- Project IAM Admin (roles/resourcemanager.projectIamAdmin)
- Pub/Sub Publisher (roles/pubsub.publisher)
- Service Account Admin (roles/iam.serviceAccountAdmin)
- Service Account User (roles/iam.serviceAccountUser)
- Service Usage Admin (roles/serviceusage.serviceUsageAdmin)
- Workflows Admin (roles/workflows.admin)
For more information about granting roles, see Manage access to projects, folders, and organizations.

You might also be able to get the required permissions through custom roles or other predefined roles.
Make note of the Compute Engine default service account as you will you attach it to an Eventarc trigger to represent the identity of the trigger for testing purposes. This service account is automatically created after enabling or using a Google Cloud service that uses Compute Engine, and with the following email format:
```
PROJECT_NUMBER-compute@developer.gserviceaccount.com
```
Replace PROJECT_NUMBER with your Google Cloud project number. You can find your project number on the Welcome page of the Google Cloud console or by running the following command:
```
gcloud projects describe PROJECT_ID --format='value(projectNumber)'
```
For production environments, we strongly recommend creating a new service account and granting it one or more IAM roles that contain the minimum permissions required and follow the principle of least privilege.

Note:
The iam.automaticIamGrantsForDefaultServiceAccounts organization policy constraint prevents the Editor role from being automatically granted to default service accounts. If you created your organization after May 3, 2024, this constraint is enforced by default.

We strongly recommend that you enforce this constraint to disable the automatic role grant. If you disable the automatic role grant, you must decide which roles to grant to the default service accounts, and then grant these roles yourself.

If the default service account already has the Editor role, we recommend that you replace the Editor role with less permissive roles. To safely modify the service account's roles, use Policy Simulator to see the impact of the change, and then grant and revoke the appropriate roles.
Grant the Workflows Invoker role (roles/workflows.invoker) on the project to the Compute Engine default service account so that the account has permission to trigger your workflow execution.
```
gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding PROJECT_ID \
    --member=serviceAccount:PROJECT_NUMBER-compute@developer.gserviceaccount.com \
    --role=roles/workflows.invoker
```
If you enabled the Cloud Pub/Sub service agent on or before April 8, 2021, to support authenticated Pub/Sub push requests, grant the Service Account Token Creator role (roles/iam.serviceAccountTokenCreator) to the service agent. Otherwise, this role is granted by default:
```
gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding PROJECT_ID \
    --member=serviceAccount:service-PROJECT_NUMBER@gcp-sa-pubsub.iam.gserviceaccount.com \
    --role=roles/iam.serviceAccountTokenCreator
```

Create and deploy a workflow

Create and deploy a workflow that gets executed when a message published to a Pub/Sub topic triggers a workflow with an HTTP request.

Open a terminal or Cloud Shell.
In your home directory, create a new file called myFirstWorkflow.yaml or myFirstWorkflow.json.

Copy and paste the following into the new file and save it:

YAML

main:
  params: [event]
  steps:
    - decode_pubsub_message:
        assign:
           - base64: ${base64.decode(event.data.message.data)}
           - message: ${text.decode(base64)}
    - return_pubsub_message:
        return: ${message}

JSON

{
  "main": {
    "params": [
      "event"
    ],
    "steps": [
      {
        "decode_pubsub_message": {
          "assign": [
            {
              "base64": "${base64.decode(event.data.message.data)}"
            },
            {
              "message": "${text.decode(base64)}"
            }
          ]
        }
      },
      {
        "return_pubsub_message": {
          "return": "${message}"
        }
      }
    ]
  }
}

Deploy the workflow:

export MY_WORKFLOW=myFirstWorkflow
gcloud workflows deploy ${MY_WORKFLOW} --source=myFirstWorkflow.yaml

Replace .yaml with .json if you copied the JSON version of the example workflow.

Create an Eventarc trigger

When a message is published to the Pub/Sub topic, the event triggers the workflow.

Create a trigger to listen for Pub/Sub messages:
New Pub/Sub topic
```
gcloud eventarc triggers create events-pubsub-trigger \
    --destination-workflow=${MY_WORKFLOW} \
    --destination-workflow-location=${WORKFLOW_LOCATION} \
    --event-filters="type=google.cloud.pubsub.topic.v1.messagePublished" \
    --service-account="PROJECT_NUMBER-compute@developer.gserviceaccount.com"
```
This creates a new Pub/Sub topic and a trigger for it called events-pubsub-trigger.
Existing Pub/Sub topic
```
gcloud eventarc triggers create events-pubsub-trigger \
    --destination-workflow=${MY_WORKFLOW} \
    --destination-workflow-location=${WORKFLOW_LOCATION} \
    --event-filters="type=google.cloud.pubsub.topic.v1.messagePublished" \
    --service-account="PROJECT_NUMBER-compute@developer.gserviceaccount.com" \
    --transport-topic=TOPIC_ID
```
Replace TOPIC_ID with the ID of the existing Pub/Sub topic.

This creates a trigger called events-pubsub-trigger for an existing Pub/Sub topic.
Note: By default, Pub/Sub subscriptions created for Eventarc persist regardless of activity and don't expire. To change the inactivity duration, see Subscription properties.

Note that when creating an Eventarc trigger for the first time in a Google Cloud project, there might be a delay in provisioning the Eventarc service agent. This issue can usually be resolved by attempting to create the trigger again. For more information, see Permission denied errors.

Confirm that the trigger was successfully created:

gcloud eventarc triggers describe events-pubsub-trigger --location=${TRIGGER_LOCATION}

The output should be similar to the following listing the time of creation and trigger location:

createTime: '2021-10-14T15:15:43.872360951Z'
[...]
name: projects/PROJECT_ID/locations/us-central1/triggers/events-pubsub-trigger

Generate and view an event

Publish a message to the Pub/Sub topic to generate an event and trigger the workflow. The generated event is passed as a runtime argument to the workflow which returns the Pub/Sub message as a result of the workflow execution. Make sure that the size of the events you pass to the workflow does not exceed 512 KB.

If you created a trigger for a new Pub/Sub topic, find and set the Pub/Sub topic created, as an environment variable:

export TOPIC_ID=$(basename $(gcloud eventarc triggers describe events-pubsub-trigger --format='value(transport.pubsub.topic)'))

To trigger the workflow, send a message to the Pub/Sub topic:
```
gcloud pubsub topics publish $TOPIC_ID --message "Hello there"
```
The generated event is passed as a runtime argument to the workflow which returns a "Hello there" message.

To verify that a workflows execution was triggered, list the last five executions:

gcloud workflows executions list ${MY_WORKFLOW} --limit=5

The output should be similar to the following, listing a NAME and STATE equal to SUCCEEDED for each workflow execution:

NAME: projects/606789101455/locations/us-central1/workflows/myFirstWorkflow/executions/8c02b8f1-8836-4a6d-99d9-fc321eb9668f
STATE: SUCCEEDED
START_TIME: 2021-09-13T19:15:10.275677049Z
END_TIME: 2021-09-13T19:15:10.963136883Z
NAME: projects/606789101455/locations/us-central1/workflows/myFirstWorkflow/executions/a6319d9d-36a6-4117-904e-3d1118bdc90a
STATE: SUCCEEDED
START_TIME: 2021-09-13T17:28:51.492864252Z
END_TIME: 2021-09-13T17:28:52.227212414Z

Note that in the NAME field in the preceding example, a6319d9d-36a6-4117-904e-3d1118bdc90a is the ID of the workflow execution. Copy your execution ID to use in the next step.

To view the execution status, run the following command:

gcloud workflows executions describe WORKFLOW_EXECUTION_ID --workflow=${MY_WORKFLOW}

Replace WORKFLOW_EXECUTION_ID with the ID of the workflow execution that corresponds to the publishing time of the Pub/Sub topic. The output is similar to the following:

argument: [...]
endTime: '2021-09-13T17:28:47.301012152Z'
name: projects/1234567/locations/us-central1/workflows/myFirstWorkflow/executions/f72bc6d4-5ea0-4dfb-bb14-2dae82303120
result: 'Hello there'
startTime: '2021-09-13T17:28:51.492864252Z'
state: SUCCEEDED

Verify that the publish_time at which the Pub/Sub message was published and the startTime of the workflow execution correspond to each other.

Congratulations, you have successfully generated an event using a Pub/Sub topic that has triggered a Workflows event receiver using Eventarc.

Clean up

Delete the workflow you created:
```
gcloud workflows delete ${MY_WORKFLOW}
```
When asked if you want to continue, enter y.

Delete the trigger you created:

gcloud eventarc triggers delete events-pubsub-trigger

Alternatively, you can delete your Google Cloud project to avoid incurring charges. Deleting your Google Cloud project stops billing for all the resources used within that project.
Caution: Deleting a project has the following effects:
- Everything in the project is deleted. If you used an existing project for the tasks in this document, when you delete it, you also delete any other work you've done in the project.
- Custom project IDs are lost. When you created this project, you might have created a custom project ID that you want to use in the future. To preserve the URLs that use the project ID, such as an appspot.com URL, delete selected resources inside the project instead of deleting the whole project.
Delete a Google Cloud project:
```
gcloud projects delete PROJECT_ID
```

Trigger Workflows using Pub/Sub messages (gcloud CLI)

Before you begin

Required permissions

Create and deploy a workflow

YAML

JSON

Create an Eventarc trigger

New Pub/Sub topic

Existing Pub/Sub topic

Generate and view an event

Clean up

What's next