Respond to Webhook

output.http-response Output v0.1.0

Answers the HTTP trigger's request mid-flow with a status, headers, and body — the run continues afterwards. Runs not started by HTTP pass through unchanged.

The Respond to Webhook step on the Studio canvas — The **Respond to Webhook** step as it appears on the Studio canvas — input pins on the left, output ports on the right.

Finding it in the library

Search the builder's node library for Respond to Webhook (it lives under Output). A single click opens the in-editor docs panel shown here — description, ports, and every property, without leaving the canvas. Double-click (or drag) to add it to the workflow.

Respond to Webhook in the node library, with the in-editor docs panel open — The library entry and the in-editor docs panel for **Respond to Webhook** — the same reference this page is generated from.

Wired up in the builder

Respond to Webhook in a real, runnable flow — captured live from the Studio editor, exactly as it looks on your canvas. This is the same workflow used for the example input & output below.

Respond to Webhook wired into a runnable workflow in the Studio builder — **Respond to Webhook** wired into a runnable flow — input on the left, output on the right.

How it’s configured

The node’s settings as the builder shows them — every field laid out with real values. In the Studio these are edited on the node: click the chevron on the divider under its ports to open them.

The Respond to Webhook node's settings in the Studio builder — The settings for **Respond to Webhook**, showing the values from the flow above.

Ports

Ports are the node’s contract with its neighbours. In the editor a port label renders bold when wired and italic when optional; ◈ ports accept attachment carriers rather than data wires.

Direction	Port	Label	What flows through it
Input	`input`	Input
Output	`output`	Output

How data flows through it

Respond to Webhook consumes the content of the incoming envelope — when it is fed directly by a trigger, the trigger’s wrapper is unwrapped at the node boundary so the node sees the actual data, not the metadata shell. Its output becomes the payload for the next node, while the envelope (trace ids, correlation, binary refs) rides along untouched. In the Runs view you always see the whole envelope for both sides of this node.

Expressions in the config

String-typed properties accept {{ }} expressions evaluated against the incoming item at run time — e.g. {{ $json.customer.email }}. On this node that’s body. JSON- and code-typed fields never interpolate — they are passed through literally.

Build it with AI

Every node in this reference is reachable through Flowdrome’s AI Copilot and the MCP tools — say what you want, and the graph surgery happens server-side. Node types resolve fuzzily, so the catalog label (Respond to Webhook) works as well as the exact type id (output.http-response).

In the Copilot panel (or any connected AI):

add a respond to webhook node after the trigger

As a step in a create_chain_workflow call:

{"type":"Respond to Webhook","config":{}}

Raw MCP call — add this node to a workflow with add_node

curl -s -X POST http://localhost:4800/mcp -H "content-type: application/json" -d '{ "jsonrpc": "2.0", "id": "1", "method": "tools/call", "params": { "name": "add_node", "arguments": { "workflowId": "<id>", "type": "Respond to Webhook" } } }'

Example input & output

Captured from a real test run of the workflow above — this is what the Runs view shows after pressing Test workflow.

Input — what the node received

The Respond to Webhook node's input envelope in the run data viewer — The input envelope in the Runs view — Flowdrome always shows the whole envelope, with the payload inside `body`.

Output — what the node produced

The Respond to Webhook node's output envelope in the run data viewer — The output envelope after the step ran.

Property reference

Every setting, with its type and default — the same fields shown configured above.

Property	Type	Default	Description
Status code `statusCode`	`int`	`200`	HTTP status code to respond with. The first Respond to Webhook node in a run answers the HTTP trigger immediately — the workflow keeps running afterwards. Runs not started by HTTP pass through unchanged.
Headers `headers`	`keyvalue`	`{}`	Extra response headers — one row per header, static values (e.g. x-request-id → abc). The reply is built from the saved workflow, so {{ }} expressions are not supported here.
Respond with `bodyMode`	`select`	`"payload"`	What to send as the response body: the node's current input payload (as JSON), a custom JSON value, or custom text. `payloadjsontext`
Body (JSON) `body`	`json`	`—`	The JSON value to respond with. Shown when `bodyMode === "json"`
Body (text) `body`	`string`	`—`	The text to respond with. Shown when `bodyMode === "text"`

Using it

It switches the whole workflow to a synchronous contract

A deployed HTTP Trigger is an async job by default: it answers 202 with a run id the moment the run starts, and the caller collects the outcome afterwards from GET /api/serve/runs/{runId}.

Putting a Respond to Webhook node anywhere in the graph changes that. The host sees the node in the document and runs the whole workflow inline instead, holding the caller’s connection until it finishes, so that the node can answer with the status code and body it chose:

POST /orders-api/orders
→ 201 { "orderId": "ord_88412" }

This is a property of the document, not of the request — the trigger has no per-call switch for it.

It chooses what the caller gets, not when

The node is a passthrough: it has an output port, whatever arrived at it leaves it unchanged, and the run carries on to whatever you wired after it.

What it does not do on a deployed host is shorten the caller’s wait. The host runs the workflow to a terminal state and then builds the HTTP reply from this node’s recorded output — so the caller holds the connection for the whole run, including everything downstream of the response node and including a park at an approval gate. Nothing on the host bounds that wait, and Prefer: wait=N does not apply to this path (see below).

If the caller must not wait for the slow part, leave the response node out and stay on the async contract: the trigger answers 202 immediately and the caller collects the outcome from GET /api/serve/runs/{runId}.

Runs that did not start from HTTP (a schedule tick, a bot message, a manual job) pass straight through the node. There is nobody to answer.

The three things a caller can get

The graph may reach the node, or it may not, so a synchronous workflow has three outcomes:

What the run did	The reply
Executed a response node	that node’s status code and body
Failed before reaching one	`500` with the run’s outcome — `{ "runId": …, "status": "failed", "error": "…" }`
Succeeded without reaching one	`202` with the run id, exactly like the async path

The 500 matters because the caller already held the socket for the entire run. Answering a contentless 202 there meant it waited for the whole thing, learned nothing about why it broke, and still had to go and poll — strictly worse than the async path, which at least sets expectations up front.

The 202 on the third row is the line the 500 must not cross. A run that succeeded having deliberately skipped its response node (an If that took the other branch) has no response to give, and inventing a 5xx for it would break every workflow that answers on one branch only.

Several response nodes, one answer

Different branches can carry their own response nodes — 200 on the happy path, 429 off a rate limiter’s Limited port, 403 off an auth check. The reply comes from the one the run actually executed, not the first one in the document. Keep them on branches that exclude each other so exactly one runs; two response nodes in series is a request with two answers, and only one of them can be sent.

An async caller that took a receipt still learns the code: it comes back as httpStatus on GET /api/serve/runs/{runId}. That field is absent when no response node ran — a run that never answered must not claim a 200 it did not send.

`Prefer: wait=N` does not apply here

The Prefer: wait=N header bounds how long the host holds a request on the async path, capped at 60 seconds. A workflow containing this node never takes that path — it is already synchronous, and the host does not bound it — so the header is inert. Sending it changes nothing.

If a synchronous workflow can run long, the fix is to drop the response node and take the 202, not the header.

Tips

Respond with picks the body. Current payload sends the node’s own input as JSON — the usual choice, because it lets the graph shape the answer. Custom JSON and Custom text send a fixed literal from the node’s config instead, ignoring the input.
Only content-type comes out of Headers. The host’s serve layer builds the reply from a status code, a content type and a body — a content-type entry in Headers overrides the default (application/json, or text/plain in Custom text mode), and any other header configured here is not sent. Anything else a client must see belongs in the body.
Status code must be an integer from 100 to 599; anything else fails the node with HTTP_RESPONSE_CONFIG_INVALID rather than sending a nonsense reply.
Binary answers work. In Current payload mode a top-level audio, image, body, data or content field holding binary becomes the raw response body, with the payload’s contentType as the content type — so a workflow can answer with an MP3 or a PDF rather than base64 in JSON.
In the editor there is no pending request to answer, so a test run passes through and records what it would have sent (meta.responded.statusCode). Deploy to see the real reply.
Two response nodes on the two branches of an approval gate (202 approved / 403 rejected) is the canonical webhook-with-a-human pattern — see the approvals guide.

Related nodes

The rest of the Output group — the same folder you’d scan in the editor’s library.

This page is generated from the node registry by gen-node-docs.mjs on every site build — ports, properties, defaults and visibility rules cannot drift from the code. The screenshots and example data are captured from a live Flowdrome by npm run shots:nodes and npm run gen:examples. The hand-authored notes above are merged in.