Human node

A human step stops the run until a person approves or rejects. The step creates an approval, notifies the approvers, and waits. The approval shows on the Checkpoints page and the cockpit’s Needs you list.

The approval’s kind depends on where the step sits in the graph: plan after a planner agent step, suppression when a decision routed to it on a suppress outcome, merge when an output step follows it, or escalation.

Config

Key	Values	Default
approvers	at least one
notifyVia	slack, teams, google_chat, discord, webhook, email, push	your notification routes
slaHours	1 to 720	24
onTimeout	park_and_renotify, end_run	park_and_renotify

An approver is one of:

Kind	Example
team	{"kind": "team", "ref": "@acme-platform/ops-leads"}
member	a member of your organisation
role	a role, such as admin
repo_admins	the repository’s admins on GitHub

Owners and admins can always decide. A human step with no approver is refused with approver_missing.

Telling people

The approval goes to the chat providers named in notifyVia through your organisation’s connections, and otherwise to your notification routes. push follows each person’s own push preferences.

Deadlines

When slaHours runs out:

onTimeout	Effect
park_and_renotify	The approvers are told again and get another slaHours.
end_run	The approval expires and the run fails.

A rejection ends the run as cancelled with reason declined:<node>. A person saying no is not counted as a failure, retried or reported as one.

The fork rule

A pull request from a fork contains code an outsider wrote. A workflow whose pull_request or pull_request_review trigger accepts forks must put a human step on every path from that trigger to a crew or a draft pull request. Otherwise publish fails with fork_pr_needs_human. The same rule is checked again when a run fires, for every untrusted event, including issues opened by people outside your team.

Plan approval

When autonomy.plan_approval is off, a human step that follows a planner succeeds at once without asking anyone.

Related

• Human approval for deciding approvals and their states.
• Checkpoints