conductor-oss--conductor/docs/documentation/configuration/workflowdef/systemtasks/index.md

description

description
Overview of built-in system tasks in Conductor — HTTP, Event, Human, Wait, Inline, Kafka Publish, JSON JQ Transform, LLM orchestration, MCP function calling, and more for durable workflow orchestration.

System Tasks

System tasks are built-in tasks that run on the Conductor server. They execute without external workers, allowing you to build workflows using common operations out of the box.

Available system tasks

System Task	Type	Description
HTTP	HTTP	Call any HTTP/REST endpoint. Supports GET, POST, PUT, DELETE with headers, body, and connection/read timeouts.
Inline	INLINE	Execute lightweight JavaScript or Python expressions server-side using GraalJS. Useful for data transformation, validation, and simple logic.
Event	EVENT	Publish events to external systems — Kafka, NATS, NATS Streaming, AMQP (RabbitMQ), SQS, or Conductor's internal queue.
Wait	WAIT	Pause workflow execution until a specified time, duration, or external signal.
Human	HUMAN	Wait for an external signal, typically a human approval or manual action. The task stays IN_PROGRESS until completed via API.
Kafka Publish	KAFKA_PUBLISH	Publish messages directly to a Kafka topic with configurable serializers and headers.
JSON JQ Transform	JSON_JQ_TRANSFORM	Transform JSON data using jq expressions. Powerful for reshaping, filtering, and aggregating data.
No Op	NOOP	Do nothing. Useful as a placeholder or to merge branches in fork/join patterns.
JDBC	JDBC	Execute SQL queries and updates against relational databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, etc.) with connection pooling and transaction management.

Operators (flow control)

These are also system tasks but control workflow execution flow rather than performing work:

Operator	Type	Description
Fork/Join	FORK_JOIN	Execute tasks in parallel branches, then join.
Dynamic Fork	FORK_JOIN_DYNAMIC	Dynamically create parallel branches at runtime.
Join	JOIN	Wait for parallel branches to complete.
Switch	SWITCH	Conditional branching based on expressions or values.
Do While	DO_WHILE	Loop over tasks until a condition is met.
Sub Workflow	SUB_WORKFLOW	Execute another workflow as a task.
Start Workflow	START_WORKFLOW	Start another workflow asynchronously (fire-and-forget).
Set Variable	SET_VARIABLE	Set or update workflow-level variables.
Terminate	TERMINATE	Terminate the workflow with a specified status.
Dynamic	DYNAMIC	Determine the task type to execute at runtime.

AI & LLM tasks

Conductor is the only open-source workflow engine with native AI system tasks. These tasks require the ai module to be enabled and provide direct integration with 14+ LLM providers, 3 vector databases, and MCP servers — no external frameworks or custom workers needed.

LLM

Task	Type	Description
Chat Completion	LLM_CHAT_COMPLETE	Multi-turn conversational AI with optional tool calling. Supports all major LLM providers.
Text Completion	LLM_TEXT_COMPLETE	Single prompt completion.

Supported providers: Anthropic (Claude), OpenAI (GPT), Azure OpenAI, Google Gemini, AWS Bedrock, Mistral, Cohere, HuggingFace, Ollama, Perplexity, Grok (xAI), StabilityAI, and more. Switch providers by changing a configuration parameter — no code changes required.

Embeddings & Vector Search

Task	Type	Description
Generate Embeddings	LLM_GENERATE_EMBEDDINGS	Convert text to vector embeddings.
Store Embeddings	LLM_STORE_EMBEDDINGS	Store pre-computed embeddings in a vector database.
Index Text	LLM_INDEX_TEXT	Store text with auto-generated embeddings in a vector database.
Search Index	LLM_SEARCH_INDEX	Semantic search using a text query.
Search Embeddings	LLM_SEARCH_EMBEDDINGS	Search using embedding vectors directly.

Supported vector databases: Pinecone, pgvector (PostgreSQL), and MongoDB Atlas Vector Search. These enable RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) pipelines as standard Conductor workflows.

Content Generation

Task	Type	Description
Generate Image	GENERATE_IMAGE	Generate images from text prompts.
Generate Audio	GENERATE_AUDIO	Text-to-speech synthesis.
Generate Video	GENERATE_VIDEO	Generate videos from text or image prompts (async).
Generate PDF	GENERATE_PDF	Convert markdown to PDF documents.

MCP (Model Context Protocol)

Task	Type	Description
List MCP Tools	LIST_MCP_TOOLS	List available tools from an MCP server.
Call MCP Tool	CALL_MCP_TOOL	Execute a tool on an MCP server.

MCP integration enables Conductor workflows to discover and use tools from any MCP-compatible server, and to expose Conductor workflows as MCP tools for use by LLMs and AI agents.

Deprecated

Task	Replacement
Lambda	Use Inline instead.
Decision	Use Switch instead.