clay-share-workflow

name	clay-share-workflow
description	Share a Clay workflow you built as a community template - use when a user wants to publish a table/spec they built as a reusable template, or asks how to contribute to community/templates.

clay-share-workflow

Sharing is a guided wizard, not a copy-paste. It rebuilds a clean template from your workflow's structure and logic - it never copies raw column config, which is where API keys and client data hide in a real Clay table.

Run the wizard

node scripts/contribute.js

This is also wired into package.json, so it's runnable as npm run share.

Two modes:

node scripts/contribute.js                          # guided from scratch, Q&A in the terminal
node scripts/contribute.js --from my-spec.yaml       # rebuild from an export-spec file

Use --from if you already have a spec from node clay-v2.js export-spec ... (/clay-build-table) - the wizard reconstructs steps and input variables from it automatically instead of asking you to describe each column by hand.

The rebuild-not-copy principle

The wizard never touches your live table config directly. For each field it sees, it classifies the field kind (action / formula / use-ai / http-placeholder) and rebuilds only the parts safe to share:

• Any input binding value shaped like a real Clay ID, a URL, a path, an email, or a known key format (or just long) is automatically replaced with a {{placeholder}}.
• use-ai prompts get real IDs, emails, and URLs inside the prompt text swapped for {{table_reference}} / {{email}} / {{url}} - but the wizard prints a note asking you to reread each prompt anyway, since prompts remember company names in ways no regex catches.
• http-placeholder steps are stripped to nothing but a note: configure your own endpoint, keep credentials in env vars, never in the column.

This is why the output is a template, structurally incapable of holding the things that leak (see community/schemas/template.schema.json - there's no field a raw export or a long token can even go into).

The preview step

Before anything is written to disk, the wizard prints the exact community/templates/<id>/template.yaml (and, if you opted into a contributor profile, community/contributors/<handle>/profile.yaml) it's about to create, and asks:

Read the preview like a stranger would. Company names in prompts? Real IDs? Anything you would not put on a billboard?

Read it that carefully before answering y. If anything looks off, answer n (or just don't type y) - nothing is written, and you can delete the template's id folder and start over.

Optional nicer preview: if npx -y lavish-axi is available in your environment, you can render this preview as an HTML page for easier review instead of reading raw terminal YAML - plain terminal preview is the default and always works, so treat this as a convenience, not a requirement.

The profile opt-in question

The wizard asks once: "Create a public profile? [Y/n]" - a public page with your name, company, and LinkedIn that your templates link to and that ranks you on the front-page leaderboard by vote totals. It is entirely optional: answer n and your template ships with author: anonymous. If you opt in, only a GitHub handle and first name are required; company, role, last name, and LinkedIn are all optional.

What happens after you approve

1. The wizard writes community/templates/<id>/template.yaml (and the profile file, if any).
2. It immediately runs the same two gates CI will run on your PR:

   node scripts/scan-repo.js
   node scripts/validate-community.js
   

   If either fails, fix the findings (or delete the template's id folder to start over) - nothing partial gets left in a broken state for you to accidentally commit.
3. On success it prints the exact publish steps:

   git checkout -b share/<id>
   git add community/templates/<id>/ community/contributors/<handle>/
   git commit -m "template: <title>"
   git push and open a pull request
   

4. After merge, your template gets a voting thread automatically - the same checks run again on the PR, so a template that passed locally will also pass in CI.

Gotchas

• Template ids are kebab-case, 3-60 chars, and must be unique - the wizard checks for an existing folder with the same id before asking anything else.
• --from only works against a spec file (export-spec output), not a live table ID
  • export first with /clay-build-table, then share.
• A template needs at least one step; the wizard refuses to write an empty one.