Development

These are instructions for how to builds a new automation from scratching using Finic. See Finic Recorder for how to automatically generate an automation with the Finic chrome extension.

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Initializing a new project

Install Finic globally with pip install finic or pipx install finic. Then run the following command to create a new Finic automation in the current directory.

$ finic init <automation-name>

This automatically sets up your project structure, including some boilerplate code. Your code should go in main.py.

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Providing inputs

Most automations will require input varibles to be provided at runtime. This can include auth secrets like usernames and passwords, variables that define the automation’s behavior, or values that should be input into form fields.

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Local

You can include input values in a file called finic_input.json in the root directory of your project. This automaticaly gets picked up by Finic and passed into your main function.

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Production

In production, you can specify inputs for a task when running it manually from the Finic dashboard, or by specifying it in a task_input parameter in the request body when triggering a task from the API.

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Defining selectors

Selectors should be placed in selectors.yaml (see the example below). Both XPath and CSS selectors are supported.

They can then be accessed directly from the Finic client, assuming the selector_source is set to file.

finic = Finic(selector_source='file')
finic.selectors.get('email_field')

Selectors can also be defined directly in your code, although this approach makes your code harder to read and less modular.

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Example

Here’s an example of a basic automation.