Integrating with Zapier

Bullet Train provides out-of-the-box support for Zapier. New Bullet Train projects include a preconfigured Zapier CLI project that is ready to zapier deploy.

Background

Zapier was designed to take advantage of an application's existing REST API, outgoing webhook capabilities, and OAuth2 authorization workflows. Thankfully for us, Bullet Train provides the first two and pre-configures Doorkeeper to provide the latter. We also have a smooth OAuth2 connection workflow that accounts for the mismatch between user-based OAuth2 and team-based multitenancy.

Prerequisites

• You must be developing in an environment with tunneling enabled.

Getting Started in Development

First, install the Zapier CLI tooling and deploy:

cd zapier
yarn install
zapier login
zapier register
zapier push

Once the application is registered in your account, you can re-run seeds in your development environment and it will create a Platform::Application record for Zapier:

cd ..
rake db:seed

When you do this for the first time, it will output some credentials for you to go back and configure for the Zapier application, like so:

cd zapier
zapier env:set 1.0.0 \
  BASE_URL=https://andrewculver.ngrok.io \
  CLIENT_ID=... \
  CLIENT_SECRET=...
cd ..

You're done and can now test creating Zaps that react to example objects being created or create example objects based on other triggers.

Deploying in Production

We haven't figured out a good suggested process for breaking out development and production versions of the Zapier application yet, but we'll update this section when we have.

Future Plans

• Extend Super Scaffolding to automatically add new resources to the Zapier CLI project. For now you have to extend the Zapier CLI definitions manually.