Four different things live here, and they are easy to confuse because they all involve secrets. The question that separates them is who is calling whom.
Which one do I need?
| You want to | You need | Direction |
|---|---|---|
| Let a script, a webhook sender, or an embedded page call into Hodoflow | A service account | Software → Hodoflow |
| Let a workflow call out to an external service that needs credentials | An outbound connector | Hodoflow → external service |
| Verify a sender that pushes data into Hodoflow | An inbound connector | External system → Hodoflow |
| Call a documented API without hand-writing URLs and parameters | An API Spec | Not a credential at all |
An API Spec is the odd one out: it is a description of an API's operations, imported from an OpenAPI or Swagger document. It stores no credentials by itself — it borrows them from a connector you attach to it.
Set one up
- What you need before you build — a matrix from what you are trying to build to what has to exist first.
- Send data into Hodoflow with a webhook — the fastest complete path, end to end.
- Service accounts — client credentials, scopes, and which member's permissions they borrow.
- Outbound connectors — credentials a workflow presents when it calls out.
- Inbound connectors — sender verification.
- API Specs — import an OpenAPI document and bind a step to one of its operations.
Keep them safe
- Naming, reuse, rotation, and deletion — everything after the thing works.
- Connection and authentication errors — the exact messages and what each one means.
How the connectors page is organised
Connectors in the sidebar opens a health overview: two cards, Outbound and Inbound, each with a breakdown of how many of your connectors are Verified, Failing, or Unverified. Clicking a slice drills into that subset. API Specs is a third tab alongside them.
Service accounts are somewhere else entirely, at Settings → Service Accounts, because they are identities for callers rather than integrations with outside services.
One connector, many workflows
A connector is one integration with one outside service, stored once and reused by every workflow that needs it. Credentials live on the connector rather than inside a step's configuration, so rotating a password is one edit instead of a hunt through your workflows.