In a modern digital business, things are always happening. A user signs up. A payment is processed. An item goes out of stock. Each of these occurrences is an "event"—a significant change in state that often requires a response. The question is, how do you build systems that can react to these events instantly, reliably, and at scale?
The answer lies in an elegant and powerful paradigm: event-driven architecture. At its core is the event-driven trigger, a simple yet transformative concept that unlocks powerful workflow automation. This is the very principle behind trigger.do: using simple, code-based triggers to automate anything.
Let's dive into what event-driven triggers are and why they are critical for any business looking to automate its processes efficiently.
Think of a smoke detector. It has one job: to listen for a specific event (the presence of smoke). When it detects that event, it executes a pre-defined action (sounding an alarm). It doesn't need to know why the smoke is there or what else is happening in the house; it simply reacts to the trigger.
An event-driven trigger in software works the same way:
This model allows you to create a system where different parts can communicate and react to each other without being tightly connected. The service that creates the event simply broadcasts, "Hey, this happened!" The trigger hears this broadcast and kicks off the appropriate response.
Adopting an event-driven approach isn't just a technical detail; it fundamentally changes how you build and scale your business logic. Here’s why it matters.
In a traditional, non-event-driven model, you might run a script every hour to check for new users. This means a new customer could wait up to 59 minutes before receiving their welcome email.
With event-driven triggers, the workflow starts the instant the signup event occurs. This real-time capability is crucial for:
Instead of burying complex business logic inside a monolithic application, event-driven architecture lets you define workflows as separate, self-contained pieces of code. A trigger is then just a simple API call that starts the right workflow.
With trigger.do, you can define your entire business logic as code and trigger it from anywhere. For example, triggering a new user onboarding workflow is as simple as a few lines of TypeScript.
import { Do } from '@do-sdk/client';
const client = new Do({ apiKey: process.env.DO_API_KEY });
// Trigger a new user onboarding workflow. Run your business as code.
async function onboardNewUser(user: { id: string; email: string; }) {
try {
const { workflowRunId } = await client.trigger('new-user-onboarding', {
payload: {
userId: user.id,
email: user.email,
plan: 'premium',
},
});
console.log(`Workflow ${workflowRunId} triggered successfully.`);
return { success: true, workflowRunId };
} catch (error) {
console.error('Failed to trigger workflow:', error);
return { success: false, error };
}
}
// Example: Trigger the workflow for a new user signup
onboardNewUser({ id: 'usr_abc123', email: 'jane.doe@example.com' });
This approach makes your system cleaner, easier to understand, and far more maintainable.
Event-driven systems are "decoupled." The service creating the event (e.g., your user authentication service) doesn't need to know about the onboarding workflow. It just sends the "new user" event.
This decoupling means:
A trigger isn't just an on/off switch. You can pass a data payload along with the event. As seen in the code example, the new-user-onboarding trigger receives the user's ID, email, and subscription plan.
This allows you to create highly dynamic and intelligent workflows. The onboarding process for a 'premium' user can be completely different from that of a 'free' user, all managed by the same trigger but with different logic based on the payload. You can trigger anything from simple, single-step actions to complex, multi-step agentic workflows that perform tasks on behalf of the user.
trigger.do is built from the ground up to make event-driven automation accessible and powerful. We handle the complexities of event listeners, security, and execution so you can focus on what matters: your business logic.
The world doesn't operate in batches, and your business processes shouldn't either. Event-driven triggers provide the foundation for building modern, responsive, and scalable applications. By treating actions as reactions to events, you create a more resilient, efficient, and intelligent system.
Ready to stop writing tangled, hard-to-maintain code and start automating your business with clean, powerful, event-driven workflows?