Pipedreams Linux: Worth Trying? (Quick Review and Comparison for New Users)

Okay, today I’m messing around with Pipedream on Linux. Let me tell you, it was a bit of a journey, but we got there in the end!

Getting Started

First things first, I needed to get Pipedream. No big deal, went over to their website and grabbed the latest version. They had a nice little command using curl. I pasted it into my terminal and it did its thing, downloading and setting everything up.

Next, I ran the command to install it in my system. The installation script asked for my password, typed it in, and boom, Pipedream was installed! I saw some messages whizzing by, talking about setting up the environment and whatnot. Looked good to me.

Playing Around

With Pipedream installed, it was time to take it for a spin. I started by creating a workflow. It took a few tries to figure out how this thing works, but I found the documentation and followed the steps. And the web UI is quite easy to use, which makes creating workflow very simple.

I set up a simple HTTP trigger, pretty much the “Hello, World!” of Pipedream, I guess. Basically, it just spits out a message when you send it a request. Nothing fancy, but hey, it’s a start!

Setting Up a Workflow

I wanted to make a workflow that would take a URL, go to that website, and grab the title. Seemed like a cool thing to do.

In the Pipedream UI, I created a new workflow and added an HTTP trigger as the starting point. Then I wanted to add a step to make a request to the URL provided in the trigger. I found a pre-built action called “Send any HTTP Request” that seemed perfect. I hooked it up to the trigger and told it to use the URL from the trigger as the request URL. Also, I need to make sure that the “Response Body Type” is “Text”.

Next, I needed a way to extract the title from the HTML of the page. I added a * code step. And I needed a library to parse the HTML. I know cheerio is very famous on this so I added it in the code’s *. Then I wrote a few lines of code using cheerio to load the HTML and grab the title tag.

Testing and Tweaking

With the workflow built, it was time to test it out. I sent a request to the trigger with a URL and… it worked! Well, sort of. It grabbed the title, but it was all messy, with extra spaces and stuff.

So, back to the code step I went. I added a bit of code to clean up the title, trimming the whitespace and making it look nice. Sent another request, and bam! It worked perfectly. The title was extracted, clean and neat.

Wrap Up

So there you have it, my little adventure with Pipedream on Linux. It was a bit of trial and error, but I managed to set it up, create a workflow, and get it to do what I wanted. It’s a pretty neat tool, and I can see myself using it for other automation tasks in the future. Might even try to build something more complicated next time. Who knows? The possibilities are endless, as they say!