Elsa Workflows
Introduction
Elsa is a powerful workflow library that enables workflow execution within any .NET application. Elsa allows you to define workflows in various ways, including:
- Writing C# code
- Using a visual designer
- Specifying workflows in JSON
Try with Docker
To give the Elsa Studio + Elsa Server a quick spin, you can run the following command to start the Elsa Docker container:
docker pull elsaworkflows/elsa-server-and-studio-v3:latest
docker run -t -i -e ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT='Development' -e HTTP_PORTS=8080 -e HTTP__BASEURL=http://localhost:13000 -p 13000:8080 elsaworkflows/elsa-server-and-studio-v3:latest
This Docker image is based on a reference ASP.NET application that hosts both the workflow server and designer and is not intended for production use.
For any non-development deployment, inject a secure random JWT signing key through environment variables or a secrets manager instead of using committed appsettings values. For code-first hosts such as Elsa.Server.Web, set Identity__Tokens__SigningKey. For shell-based hosts, set the shell feature key, for example CShells__Shells__Default__Features__Identity__SigningKey.
By default, you can access http://localhost:13000 and log in with:
Username: admin
Password: password
TLS and custom certificate authorities
All Elsa Docker images now ship with the operating system's certificate authority bundle baked in at build time. This means you can call public HTTPS endpoints such as https://example.com without any additional configuration.
If you need to trust a private or corporate CA, mount the certificate bundle into the container and reference it via EXTRA_CA_CERT:
docker run \
-v /path/to/company-ca.crt:/certs/company-ca.crt:ro \
-e EXTRA_CA_CERT=/certs/company-ca.crt \
elsaworkflows/elsa-server-and-studio-v3:latest
On startup, the container copies the certificate into /usr/local/share/ca-certificates and runs update-ca-certificates, making the trust available to .NET, OpenSSL, curl, and other system components. Multiple certificates can be provided by pointing EXTRA_CA_CERT at a directory containing .crt or .pem files.
In highly restricted environments where you cannot modify the system trust store, you can instead rely on the standard SSL_CERT_FILE or SSL_CERT_DIR environment variables:
docker run \
-v /path/to/company-ca-bundle.pem:/certs/custom.pem:ro \
-e SSL_CERT_FILE=/certs/custom.pem \
elsaworkflows/elsa-server-and-studio-v3:latest
ℹ️ Installing the CA bundle adds roughly 300KB to the Debian-based images. No package managers run at container startup; all trust updates happen immutably at build time or via the mounted certificates shown above.
Table of Contents
Documentation
Elsa Documentation Website.
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
