Placeholders and formatting

Placeholders let you pull live details from an automation's trigger — like a domain name or expiry date — straight into your messages, so alerts sound specific instead of generic. This is for anyone building or editing an automation who wants their notifications, titles or webhooks to read naturally.

Overview

• Placeholders are written as {{name}} and get swapped out for real values when the automation runs.
• The Insert value button shows every placeholder available for the trigger you picked, along with an example of what it will contain.
• You can format placeholders with filters, and use the same names inside Only if conditions to control when a rule fires.
• Sensitive fields like passwords, tokens and secrets are never offered as placeholders — they're kept out on purpose.

Insert a placeholder

1. In the step where you're writing a message, title or webhook content (for example Body, Message (optional), or Payload (JSON, optional)), click Insert value.
2. Browse the grouped list to find what you need:
   • Trigger data — details the event itself carries, such as the domain name or days left. These read cleanly with no prefix.
   • The subject group (labeled by the item's type, like Server or Certificate) — every field of the thing the event is about, even fields not included in the trigger data.
   • Organization — your organization's name or slug.
   • User — the rule owner's name or email.
   • Date & time — the current date and time, or just today's date.
   • Earlier values — anything saved by a previous Set a value step earlier in the same automation.
3. Select the value you want. It's inserted as {{name}} at your cursor.

NoteSensitive fields such as passwords, tokens, and secrets never appear in this list and won't resolve even if typed manually.

Format a placeholder

1. After a placeholder name, add a filter using a pipe (|) to change how the value looks.
2. Common filters you can use:
   • {{expires_at|date}} → Jan 15, 2026, or {{expires_at|date:Y-m-d}} → 2026-01-15
   • {{domain|upper}} or {{domain|lower}} — change the case
   • {{note|default:—}} — show a fallback when the value is empty
   • {{days_left|number}} — format a number
   • {{message|truncate:80}} — shorten long text
   • {{tags|json}} — show the raw list
3. Chain multiple filters together if needed, one after another.

TipDon't worry about typos in a filter name — unknown filters are simply ignored, so your message still sends.

Use placeholders in conditions

1. Open the Only if section of your automation step.
2. Add a condition using the same placeholder names you'd use in a message — for example, checking that a tag on the subject contains a certain word, that the rule owner's email equals a specific address, or comparing against today's date.
3. Leave the message field blank if you'd rather InfraNest write a sensible default for you — add placeholders only when you want to phrase it yourself.

Tips

• Use Earlier values to carry information from one step to a later one — save it with Set a value, then insert it anywhere downstream as {{vars.yourname}}.
• Preview how a message will look by using Test run or Preview (dry run) before saving your automation.