Workflow Engine

Workflows

Structural parity skeleton for queue-driven orchestration in a workflow context.

Install

openclaw skills install workflow-engine

Contract

This skill is intentionally skeleton-only. It provides structure parity with canonical queue orchestration without plugin hooks.

Wave 2 execution parity includes:

  • Setup derivation phase ordering: detection -> understanding -> derivation -> proposal -> generation -> validation
  • Required persisted setup artifacts: ops/derivation.md, ops/derivation-manifest.md, ops/config.yaml
  • In-skill lifecycle emulation routines (not real hook execution):
    • session orient
    • write-time validation checklist
    • stop/session capture persistence

Argument Parsing

Parse arguments in this order:

  1. positional target (optional)
  2. --handoff (boolean)
  3. --batch <id> (optional)
  4. --type <phase> (optional)
  5. unknown flags are non-fatal; report and ignore

If no target is supplied, list candidate inbox files and request explicit selection.

Runtime Loader Requirements

Before doing queue work, load runtime context from:

  • ops/derivation-manifest.md (if present)
  • ops/config.yaml (if present)
  • queue file with fallback precedence:
    1. ops/queue/queue.yaml
    2. ops/queue/queue.yml
    3. ops/queue/queue.json

If no queue file exists, fail safely with actionable remediation.

Safety Constraints

Never:

  • execute arbitrary shell from user-provided strings
  • continue processing after parse/load failures
  • mutate tasks outside declared queue schema fields
  • call external plugins/hooks (explicitly out of scope)

Always:

  • validate queue structure before state transitions
  • make state transitions explicit (extract -> create -> reflect -> reweave -> verify -> done)
  • produce deterministic handoff text when --handoff is set
  • preserve resumability by reading persisted queue state first

Scope Boundary

No plugin hooks are implemented in this skeleton. Lifecycle behavior is emulated in-skill to preserve deterministic execution semantics only.

Installation

To install the workflow-engine and enable its hooks:

# Clone or navigate to the workflow-engine directory
cd workflow-engine

# Run the install script to set up hooks
./install-hooks.sh

# Or manually enable hooks via openclaw
openclaw hooks enable session-orient
openclaw hooks enable write-validate
openclaw hooks enable session-capture