Create a new transaction process with the Sharetribe CLI

In this guide, we’ll create a new transaction process for your marketplace. We will use the negotiated booking process, where the customer and provider first negotiate on the price of the booking before the customer makes the payment.

If you want to edit an existing transaction process instead, you can follow these instructions to edit your transaction process:

• Edit a transaction process with Sharetribe CLI

Clone Sharetribe example processes repository

When you are creating a new transaction process, you can either write your process from scratch, or you can use existing processes as your starting point. Since we are using one of Sharetribe’s example processes in this guide, we will start by cloning the Sharetribe example processes repository:

git clone https://github.com/sharetribe/example-processes.git

Create a new process

To get up and running with Sharetribe CLI, see the Getting started with Sharetribe CLI guide in Dev Docs.

Let’s see what the subcommand help tells us about process create:

$ flex-cli help process create
create a new transaction process
 
USAGE
  $ flex-cli process create
 
OPTIONS
  --path=LOCAL_PROCESS_DIR          path to the directory where the process.edn file is
  --process=PROCESS_NAME            name for the new process that is created
  -m, --marketplace=MARKETPLACE_ID  marketplace identifier

To create a new process, we need to specify a path to the local directory. That directory should contain two things:

• the process definition (process.edn file) and
• a templates subdirectory containing correct email templates for the email notifications defined in that process.

We already have those since we cloned the example-processes repository. If you are creating your own transaction process, make sure that you are including both the process.edn file and the templates directory in your process directory.

In addition, we need to define a name for the process and the target marketplace environment. You can use the same process name, for example “negotiated-booking”, or you can name it something different, such as “booking-with-negotiation”. For clarity, in this example we’ll use a different name for the new process.

flex-cli process create --path=./negotiated-booking --process=booking-with-negotiation -m=my-marketplace-dev

After executing that command, you can go to the Sharetribe Console: Build > Advanced > Transaction process visualizer and see that the “booking-with-negotiation” process is there.

Create a process alias

The process is created, but we still can’t reference that process from our client app, since it doesn’t have process alias set. We can create an alias for our new process with Sharetribe CLI command:

flex-cli process create-alias --process=booking-with-negotiation --version=1 --alias=release-1 -m=my-marketplace-dev

With that command, we are creating a new alias “release-1” and point it to the previously created process and its version 1.

After that you should see the alias in the Console:
booking-with-negotiation/release-1.

Now, you can initiate transactions with this process using the API or SDK!

Summary

In this guide, you added a new transaction process in your Sharetribe marketplace environment, and set an alias to the process so you can reference it with the API.

If you are using the Sharetribe Web Template, you also need to modify your client app to use this process. You can follow the steps in this guide to do that:

• Change transaction process in Sharetribe Web Template