Skip to content

Quickstart

Get Ploston running and call your first workflow in under 10 minutes.

If you haven't installed Ploston yet, start with the Installation guide.

Prerequisites

  • ploston bootstrap completed (Control Plane running)
  • ploston init --import completed (local runner started, tools imported)
  • Claude Desktop restarted

Verify everything is up:

ploston runner status
ploston tools list

Step 1: Create a workflow file

Create a file called hello.yaml anywhere on your machine:

name: hello
version: "1.0.0"
description: "A simple greeting workflow"

inputs:
  - name: name
    type: string
    default: "World"

steps:
  - id: greet
    code: |
      name = context.inputs['name']
      return {"message": f"Hello, {name}! This ran deterministically inside Ploston."}

outputs:
  result:
    from: steps.greet.output

Step 2: Validate it

ploston validate hello.yaml

Expected output:

✓ Workflow 'hello' is valid
  Steps: 1
  Inputs: name (string, default: "World")
  Outputs: result

Step 3: Run it from the CLI

ploston run hello.yaml

Expected output:

✓ Executed: hello
Result: {"message": "Hello, World! This ran deterministically inside Ploston."}
Duration: 42ms
Execution ID: exec-a1b2c3d4

Run with a custom input:

ploston run hello.yaml -i name=Alice

Step 4: Register it with the Control Plane

To make the workflow available as an MCP tool that Claude can call, copy it into your workflows directory and register it:

# Copy to wherever your workflows dir is configured
cp hello.yaml ~/my-workflows/hello.yaml

Then check it's registered:

ploston workflows list

You should see hello in the list. Claude Desktop can now call it as w_hello.

Step 5: Call it from Claude Desktop

Open Claude Desktop and try:

"Call the hello workflow with my name"

Claude will invoke w_hello — a single MCP tool call. Ploston executes it deterministically and returns the result. No orchestration loops, no intermediate tokens.

What just happened

Claude Desktop
    │
    │  1 MCP call: w_hello(name="Alice")
    ▼
Ploston Control Plane
    │
    │  Executes: step greet (sandboxed Python)
    │  Duration: 42ms
    │  Trace: exec-a1b2c3d4
    ▼
Result returned to Claude Desktop

The LLM made one decision ("call hello workflow"), Ploston handled the execution. That's the pattern — at any scale.

Next steps