Hey Product Hunt!
At Zapier we help people connect and automate their apps without writing any code. So this new tool is a little out of the ordinary for us: Code by Zapier gives anyone the option to write custom steps for their Zap workflows using Python or JavaScript with zero deployment or hosting.
Here are a few examples of how Code could transform your app data:
- Replace crontabs
- Convert dates to a different format
- Run basic calculations
- Make API calls
- Extract email addresses from a block of text
- Split first and last names
Really, though, that's just the tip of the iceberg. Code makes your Zapier data even more flexible. There are a few more ideas in the announcement post on our blog: https://zapier.com/blog/zapier-c...
You can read the docs for Python here https://zapier.com/help/code-pyt... and Javascript here https://zapier.com/help/code/.
If you have any questions, let me know! I'll hang around to answer them.
-bryan
@mnlfrgr Ah - that makes sense - we're relying on AWS Lambda behind the scenes - so if they add native support for Ruby it would greatly simplify it for us, I doubt we write a special wrapper though!
@bryanhelmig Hey Bryan, a lot of people using my app Maître (https://www.producthunt.com/tech...) asked for a Zapier integration, however I'm struggling a bit to get it working.. Any chance one of you guys can help me? Cheers
I had a great experience w this, just the other day. At USV, we use zapier to tie a lot of things together, in particular pushing various things into our team slack.
In one case -- where we push team Swarm checkins to a Slack channel, a regular zapier integration didn't do the trick, because the data we needed was buried inside a text blob in one of the Swarm data fields. My initial solution was hacky and cumbersome -- I set up a webhook in zapier, pointing to one of our internal servers, and from there I did some processing on the data, and then made a custom API call to slack. This did the trick, but it was a lot of work -- needed to set up custom routes and handlers in my web app, then interact w the Slack api directly.
What I just did was replace the same workflow the new Code by Zapier and multi-step zaps. So now, step one pulls data from our Swarm checkin, step two is a Code zap, where we use some simple python to pick through the text and pull out the data we want, and step 3 is a Slack notification, pulling data from both step 1 (swarm) and step 2 (code). The whole thing is so simpler and cleaner now -- instead of setting up a bunch of custom code on our web server, we have just a few lines of python right inside zapier.
As I've been saying to folks here, I'm totally addicted by zapier right now, am looking for more opportunities to replace heavy, custom app code with zapier routines.
@romanzadyrako I absolutely agree with @andrewwarner, Stamplay is IFTTT for code, zapier is elegant and can be used to manage the connections between apps with the ease of IFTTT but allowed me to absolutely automate my backend without a single line of code written
Penny