Body Required

• id string(uuid) Required

  Unique id for this event. Stable across redeliveries, so it is the dedupe key. Assigned when the state change is recorded rather than when the message is dispatched.

• type string Required

  The topic name, identical to the channel address. Route on this.

  Value is automation.run.started.

• api_version string Required

  The Commune-Version value this payload conforms to. Present on the message itself, not only on the request header, so an event persisted to a consumer's own store stays self-describing.

• occurred_at string(date-time) Required

  RFC 3339 timestamp of the state change, not of the delivery attempt. Use it to order events, since delivery order is not guaranteed.

• newsletter_id string(uuid) | null Required

  The newsletter the change belongs to. This is the tenant boundary: a consumer only ever receives events for newsletters its credential can read. Null only for events that are genuinely not newsletter-scoped, which none of the topics Commune publishes currently are.

• actor object | null Required

  Who caused the change, and null when nobody in particular did.

  Populated on a change made through this API's write operations, where it is the credential, and on a change one of the newsletter's own automations made, where it is the run. Null on every other change: an edit a creator made in the product, an import arriving from a provider, a scheduled job, a delivery result reported by the sending provider. Null is therefore the common case and stays a legitimate value. Read it as "this change was attributed", never as "nothing caused this".

  It never names a person: an api_key actor is the credential and a system actor is an automation run.

  It answers "did this change come in through the API, and under which credential". It is not the field to drop the echo of your own write with: use idempotency_key, which you chose and therefore already know, whereas id here is Commune's own identifier for your credential and no operation reports it back to you. A creator can read that identifier in Commune, but it changes when the credential is replaced, so matching on it puts the loop back silently after a rotation.

  Additional properties are NOT allowed.

  Hide actor attributes Show actor attributes object | null

  • type string Required

    api_key for a change made through this API. system for a change one of the newsletter's own automations made, where id is the automation run and label names the automation: see automation.run.started for what that attribution is for. user is reserved for a change a named person made through an authenticated session and is not emitted.

    An OAuth access token reports as api_key as well. The two credentials are interchangeable everywhere else in this API, and a separate value here would be a distinction a consumer cannot act on.

    Values are user, api_key, or system.

  • id string Required

    Identifier of the actor within its type. For api_key it is the credential's own id and never its secret, and it is the same value that appears in a creator's list of credentials, so an event can be traced back to the integration that caused it.

  • label string | null

    Human-readable name for display. Best effort, may be null.

• idempotency_key string | null Required

  The Idempotency-Key of the API write that caused this change, so a consumer can tie an event back to its own request and collapse the duplicates a retried write would otherwise produce.

  This is how a consumer that writes recognises its own work. Keep the keys you send, and skip any event carrying one of them. You chose the value, so you know it before the event arrives. actor cannot do this job, because Commune's id for your credential is not something this API reports to you.

  Null for every change that did not come in through this API, which is most of them: an edit made in Commune, an import, a scheduled job and a delivery result all have no originating request to key on.

  It reaches every endpoint registered for the newsletter, not only the one that made the write, so choose opaque keys such as UUIDs rather than keys carrying your own business identifiers.

  Maximum length is 255.

• data object Required

  Event-specific body. Narrowed by each concrete event schema below.

  Hide data attributes Show data attributes object

  • run_id string(uuid) Required

    Commune's identifier for this run, and the value actor.id carries on this message and on every event this run's own actions cause.

  • automation_id string(uuid) Required

    The automation this run is a passage through.

  • automation_name string Required

    The automation's name as the creator last saved it, so a consumer can report the run without a second call. Renaming the automation does not rewrite the events already delivered.

  • trigger string Required

    The event topic the automation is built on, which is the topic of the event that started this run. One of the topics in this webhooks block: every topic Commune publishes is a trigger.

  • subscriber_id string(uuid) | null Required

    The person the run is about. Null when the run's trigger is not about a person, which is every topic outside the subscriber.* and delivery.* families. Such a run can read its event and wait, but it has nobody to email or tag.

  • event_id string(uuid) Required

    The envelope id of the event that started the run. The same value a consumer saw on that message, so a run can be tied back to the change that caused it. UNIQUE (automation_id, event_id) is what stops one event starting the same automation twice, so this pair is also the run's natural key.

  • chain_depth integer Required

    How many automations' actions led to this run. Zero for a run caused by a person or by Commune itself, one for a run started by what another automation did, and so on. Five is the limit: a sixth hop is refused rather than started, and so is any hop that would re-enter an automation already in the chain.

    The chain itself is not in the payload. actor.id names the run that caused the event this run started from, so a consumer that keeps these messages can walk the chain back one hop per message.

    Minimum value is 0.

  • started_at string(date-time) Required

    When the run was created. Equal to occurred_at on automation.run.started, and earlier than it on the other two.