Import, Export & Publish

CRAFT supports several ways to move automation artifacts between machines and teams. Each operation has distinct seat requirements and passes through the Preview/Validate Gate.

Operations at a Glance

Run

Execute an automation locally inside your CAD host. Requires a Runner seat or higher.

Validate

Re-inspect an automation (read-only). No seat required. Never executes.

Export

Package an automation as a portable zip archive. Requires a Creator seat or higher.

Import

Receive and inspect an external automation package. Any authenticated user may import and view. Running an imported automation requires a Runner seat.

Publish

Promote an automation to the shared registry. Requires a Creator seat and a Team or Enterprise tier.

Export

Export packages an automation artifact into a single zip archive containing the manifest, artifact definition, and lockfile. The export carries embedded attribution metadata (author, tenant, creation timestamp).

Export requires passing through the Gate, including the egress disclosure panel. The exported zip is a self-contained package that can be shared with another CRAFT user via any file transfer method.

Import

Import receives a zip package exported by another CRAFT user. The Gate verifies the package integrity and displays the egress disclosure for any egress implied by the artifact.

Any authenticated user can import and view an automation. To run an imported automation, you need a Runner seat or higher. If the package fails vendor signature verification, the import is blocked.

Publish

Publish promotes an automation artifact to the shared registry — a passive, read-only artifact store hosted on the CRAFT server.

• The registry does not execute automations. It stores and serves signed artifacts only.
• The server signs the artifact at publish time using the CRAFT signing key.
• The signature binds to the artifact content — byte-level integrity is preserved.

Immutability

Published artifacts are immutable. Once an artifact version is published, it cannot be modified or overwritten. If you need to make changes, publish a new version with an incremented version number. Attempting to overwrite a published version returns an error.

The artifact state machine is: draft → published → deprecated. There is no rollback from published to draft.

The Passive Registry

The shared registry is a passive content store. It accepts signed artifacts, serves them for download, and provides version history and provenance metadata. It does not execute, modify, or interpret automations in any way.

Package Format

Automation packages are self-contained zip archives containing:

• Artifact identity, version, and content hashes
• The automation definition
• A dependency lockfile for reproducible re-runs
• Attribution metadata (author, tenant, creation timestamp)
• Optional documentation

Packages are built deterministically so that identical content always produces identical bytes. This is what allows cryptographic signature verification to work reliably.

Seat Requirements Summary