Share automations (the automation marketplace)

What it is

The Automations tab in the Marketplace lets you share your recipes (multi-step automations — e.g. a daily comic-scraper or digest) with other people, and install ones they've shared. It's a second content type alongside the plugin marketplace.

There are two ways to share, and every path is built to be safe — a shared automation is an executable recipe that runs on someone else's machine:

• Copy a code (offline). On any recipe, click Share → Omniscio packages it into a copy-paste code, stripping out anything private first (secrets, API keys, file paths, and anything tied to your account or projects) and flagging anything key-shaped so you can double-check. Send the code to anyone; they paste it into Import and get the automation.
• Publish to the public catalog. The same Share dialog can Publish the automation to the browsable marketplace (sign in with GitHub the first time). It lands as a pending submission that an admin reviews before it's listed.

However you get one, an imported automation always arrives paused — it can't run until you review its steps and approve it in the inbox. Recipes that depend on something local (another recipe, a local script, a file on disk) can't be shared and Share tells you why.

The public browse grid appears once the cloud catalog is live; until then the tab shows the offline code-based import path (which works with no internet).

Where to find it

How to use it

1. Share one of your recipes. In the Recipes view, hover a recipe and click the Share icon. The dialog shows the copy-paste code (with what was removed and any secret warnings), plus a Publish to the marketplace option (pick a category → Publish).
2. Import from a code. Marketplace → Automations → Import automation → paste the code. You'll see a preview (name, step count, and a reminder it stays paused) before you import.
3. Browse & install. When the catalog is live, the Automations tab lists shared automations — search them and click Install to add one as a paused recipe.
4. Approve before it runs. Every imported/installed automation is paused. Open it in the inbox, review the steps, and approve it — only then can it run.
5. Review submissions (admins). If you're a marketplace admin, a Review queue appears at the top of the Automations tab: Approve (publishes it) or Reject each pending submission.

How it behaves

Good to know

• Publishing needs an approved publisher account, not just a sign-in. Publish is refused with a 403 unless your account is an approved marketplace publisher (admins always pass). The first refusal records your request so an admin can approve you, and nothing about the automation is stored. It is the same gate that covers plugin uploads — see plugin-marketplace.md and the publisher-gate contract. Sharing by code is unaffected — it never touches the cloud.

• Nothing private ever leaves your machine — sharing builds the public copy from an allow-list of safe fields, so a secret hiding in an odd field simply never travels.

• "Requires: Jira · Supermail" tells you what to connect BEFORE you install. An automation that works across your apps only runs if those apps are set up on your machine — the person who wrote it had their own Jira connected, you might not. Every listing now declares what it needs, and the browse card shows it while you are still deciding. If you install one anyway, its first step checks your actual setup and stops with a plain sentence telling you what to turn on, instead of failing halfway through and leaving things half-done.

  Publishers do not have to get this right by hand: publishing reads which apps an automation actually uses and flags any it forgot to declare. A cross-app automation is not blocked from being published just because it needs Jira — needing an app you can go and connect is a normal thing for an automation to do, unlike depending on a file that only exists on the author's computer, which still blocks sharing.

• Curated: published automations are reviewed by an admin before they're publicly listed.

• The catalog lives in the marketplace's own cloud project (separate from your app data); see automation-marketplace-contract.md.

Related

The plugin half of the same marketplace is covered in Plugin marketplace, and both share the publisher gate described above. What an installed automation's steps behave like is set out in Automation Rules, and the secrets an automation asks you to connect are stored the way Automation credentials describes.