# First Automate Project Walkthrough ### About this export | Field | Value | | --- | --- | | **content_type** | lesson | | **platform** | contentstack-academy | | **source_url** | https://www.contentstack.com/academy/courses/automate-foundations/first-automate-project-walkthrough | | **course_slug** | automate-foundations | | **lesson_slug** | first-automate-project-walkthrough | | **markdown_file_url** | /academy/md/courses/automate-foundations/first-automate-project-walkthrough.md | | **generated_at** | 2026-05-11T07:02:18.401Z | > Part of **[Automate Foundations](https://www.contentstack.com/academy/courses/automate-foundations)** on Contentstack Academy. **Academy MD v3** — structured for retrieval; no quiz or assessment keys. #### Video details #### At a glance - **Title:** Ah-first Ah Project - **Duration:** 7m 12s - **Media link:** https://cdn.jwplayer.com/previews/cn4Eqtpu - **Publish date (unix):** 1713750111 #### Streaming renditions - application/vnd.apple.mpegurl - audio/mp4 · AAC Audio · 113426 kbps - video/mp4 · 180p · 180p · 139038 kbps - video/mp4 · 270p · 270p · 153222 kbps - video/mp4 · 360p · 360p · 169831 kbps - video/mp4 · 406p · 406p · 177682 kbps - video/mp4 · 540p · 540p · 208781 kbps - video/mp4 · 720p · 720p · 254056 kbps - video/mp4 · 1080p · 1080p · 351856 kbps #### Timed text tracks (delivery) - **thumbnails:** `https://cdn.jwplayer.com/strips/cn4Eqtpu-120.vtt` #### Video transcript Welcome to ContentStack's Automation Hub. In this video, we will take a look at creating our first automation. When we publish a content entry, we want to send an e-mail to a user. It's a very simple automation, but lets us get an understanding of how to create an automation and how to turn it on and execute it. Let's go ahead and get started. First, let's click on the ContentStack icon in the top left. That's going to take us to the organization view. Over here in the organization view, we have a few options on the left side, and one of them is Automation Hub. Click on Automation Hub icon or press the A key. This takes us to our Automation Hub dashboard, where you can see a list of our Automation Hub projects. Currently, I have one called Translation. We want to make a new one to send our e-mail. So I'm going to click on the new project icon in the top right. The project can contain multiple automations. So possibly later on, I want to add other automations that do things on publish. So I'm going to call this Automations for Publish Action. So anytime somebody publishes an entry or an asset, I might want to perform some automations. Click the Create button. Now it's going to create my empty Automation Hub project for me. At this point, we can either browse a marketplace for some existing automation projects that we can reuse or we can create a new automation. In this video, we're going to do the new Automation Action. Our automation name is going to be notify users by e-mail when publishing. Now we get a chance to choose our connector. Because we're starting with an action from Content Stack, the publish action on an entry, we want to choose a Content Stack connector. We'll talk about the other connectors in future videos. Now it's a chance to choose our trigger. The trigger is what's going to start the automation. We want to do that on an entry whenever an entry is published. So I'll choose the entry trigger, and then down here under Event, I'm going to choose Published. We're also going to select our stack. Now it's telling me it can't read it yet, and that's because we haven't actually logged in and set up an account. So the first step we should do is actually add a new account. This is going to authorize Automation Hub to access Content Stack and read the Content Stack and other properties inside Content Stack. It uses OAuth for authentication, so it's a secure system. Choosing our organization here. The next thing we're going to do is just save that. So now we have our Content Stack account set up. We can also go in here to stack and choose our Next.js training stack. That's it. We can go ahead and click proceed here. By the way, we also have optional fields, and if you wanted to run this only on a specific content type, or when we publish to production or publish to preview, you can set up these at this time. You can edit that later on. So if you want to use a content type or environment, you should set it up right now. We're going to just, every time we publish something, go ahead and send an e-mail, so we'll leave that empty. Go ahead and click proceed, and now testing the trigger. This is one of the most important steps when you're working with Automation Hub, is testing the trigger in the first step and loading in the JSON of this entry into the automation. That's going to give us access to the properties and content of this entry later on. Click the test trigger button, and it's going to ask me to go ahead and perform an action. So now what I need to do is go back into Content Stack, for example, and publish something from my Next.js starter site. So here I am in my organization. Let's go to the Next.js starter site and go ahead and publish any of these entries. And we're not filtering right now in the publish action, so we can publish them anywhere to, where any of these environments would be fine. Now going back into Automation Hub, let's retest, and we get all the properties loaded in. System properties, but also content as well. Save and exit, and save and exit. Next, let's go to step two over here, configure action step. Click on action step. And now here are the actions that we can perform with this data, with this entry that's being published. Maybe we want to add it to an error table. Maybe we want to send it to a search index. Maybe we want to do something else in Content Stack. But for this automation today, what we want to do is send an email. So navigate down here, email by Automation Hub, and select that. Over here on the to address, type in your email address, so you can receive that email on your account for testing. Subject, I'm going to say page published from Content Stack. Body type is text, and then the body, we can say page with title. Here now we can use the variables that we have from our first step. If you only see global, then go back to step one and do retest, because only when you test on the first step, you're going to have the entry trigger with the properties there. When you search and search for title, and select my entry title right there, page with title, this is published. Okay. So we have our text, we have a variable coming in, and then we're ready to go ahead and proceed. Let's test the action. And now Content Stack is sending an email to your email account right here. Here you can see my email message, page with the title, the future of business with AI is published. So that's looking great. The next step we want to do is just save and exit, and turn the automation on, so it's going to run every time. By the way, you can have up to 20 of these action steps. Today, we're just testing with email, but in the future, you can have more complicated automations. So to activate the automation in the top left, we're going to turn that toggle on to activate automation. Now it's turned on, it's going to be listening for every publish event from that stack. So go back into your stack and choose another item, hit the publish button, and publish it out to an environment. Over here in Content Stack in your email, check your email again. You should see another email here. Here I see page with title robotics is published. That's about it for this video. So as a quick recap, what did we do? As we first started by going to Automation Hub, the next thing we did is we created a new project. We gave that project a name, and then we created a new automation. The automation has two steps. On the entry trigger over here, we're using the Content Stack connector and the entry trigger, and we're listening for the publish event. We tested that to load the JSON in there. And then step two, we came down here and used the email connector to email us whenever any page is published from Content Stack. Hope you were successful like me and see you in another video. Thank you. #### Key takeaways - Connect **First Automate Project Walkthrough** back to your stack configuration before moving to the next module. - Capture one concrete artifact (screenshot, Postman call, or code snippet) that proves the step works in your environment. - Re-read the delivery versus management boundary for anything you changed in the entry model. ## Supplement for indexing ### Content summary First Automate Project Walkthrough. First Automate Project Walkthrough in Automate Foundations (automate-foundations). ### Retrieval tags - First - Automate - Project - Walkthrough - automate-foundations - lesson 03 - First Automate Project Walkthrough - automate-foundations lesson ### Indexing notes Index this lesson as a primary chunk tagged with lesson_id "03" and topics: [First, Automate, Project, Walkthrough]. Parent course slug: automate-foundations. Use asset_references URLs as thumbnail hints in search results when present. Never surface LMS quiz content or assessment answers from this file. ### Asset references | Label | URL | | --- | --- | | Video thumbnail: First Automate Project Walkthrough | `https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/cn4Eqtpu/poster.jpg?width=720` | ### External links | Label | URL | | --- | --- | | Contentstack Academy home | `https://www.contentstack.com/academy/` | | Training instance setup | `https://www.contentstack.com/academy/training-instance` | | Academy playground (GitHub) | `https://github.com/contentstack/contentstack-academy-playground` | | Contentstack documentation | `https://www.contentstack.com/docs/` |