Triggers

Something happens outside PostRite — today, a Twitch stream going live — and a rule publishes for you, without anyone opening the app.

This is one of the two kinds of automation. The overview compares it with flows, which answer a person instead of publishing.

How a rule works

A rule reads as one sentence: when this happens, publish this template to these accounts. When the rule fires, PostRite creates a normal post and sends it through the same publishing pipeline as anything you schedule — so retries, failure notifications and analytics all work exactly the same way.

Connect a channel

A rule listens to an external account. Today that means a Twitch channel, connected from Automations › Triggers in the sidebar. It is a trigger source, not a publishing destination — Twitch will never appear as a place to post, and it does not count toward your plan's connected accounts.

  1. Open Automations › Triggers and click Connect on the Twitch card.
  2. Authorize PostRite in the window that opens. We only ask for enough access to confirm the channel is yours.
  3. The channel appears with a Listening badge once Twitch confirms the connection.

If the badge ever reads "Not listening", the connection to Twitch broke on their side. PostRite repairs it automatically once a day, and you can reconnect the channel at any time to fix it immediately.

Create a rule

  1. Choose the channel and the trigger — when you go live, or when your stream ends.
  2. Pick the template to publish.
  3. Select the connected accounts it should publish to.
  4. Optionally narrow it with conditions, and set the guardrails below.
  5. Save. The rule is live as soon as it is switched on.

Options some platforms need

A few destinations need a setting that belongs to one specific account. The rule asks for those once and applies them to every run — everything else about what gets published comes from the template.

  • Discord: pick the channel — unless you connected the server through a webhook, which already points at one.
  • Pinterest: pick the board.
  • WhatsApp: enter the recipient number.
  • TikTok: pick who can see the post.
  • Everything else lives on the template: the text (including different text per network), the media, the YouTube title, the Google Business event or offer, and the rest of the network options.
  • Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest only publish with media, and YouTube only with a video — so the template has to carry it.

The rule is checked the moment you save it, so anything missing is flagged in the form instead of turning into a failed run later — and the message names the network and the reason, not just "something went wrong". The check runs when you change what the rule publishes, or when you switch it on; turning a rule off always works, even while it has a problem, because that is how you stop it. The form also shows the chosen template's content and media, so you can see what the rule will actually post.

Using live stream details in the post

Your template can pull details from the stream that triggered it. Write the variable anywhere in the template and it is replaced when the post goes out:

  • {{stream_title}} — the title of the stream
  • {{stream_game}} — the category the channel is set to
  • {{stream_started_at}} — when the stream went live, in your workspace timezone. It only exists on the went live trigger; in a rule that reacts to a stream ending, it is not offered.
  • {{channel_name}} and {{channel_login}} — the channel's display name and handle
  • {{channel_url}} — the public link to the channel

Firing only for some streams

Conditions let one channel drive different posts. Leave them empty and the rule fires for every stream.

  • Categories — only fire when the channel is set to one of the categories you list.
  • Title contains — only fire when the stream title includes a word you choose.

Guardrails

Three settings keep a rule from posting more than you want:

  • Cooldown — the minimum time between two posts from the same rule. Six hours by default.
  • Max runs per day — a hard ceiling, counted in your workspace timezone.
  • Delay — wait a few seconds or minutes after the event before publishing.

Keep the cooldown. If your connection drops mid-stream and you come back, Twitch reports a second "went live" — the cooldown is what stops that from becoming a second post.

Seeing what happened

Every rule keeps a history, and it records the times it deliberately did nothing as well as the times it published. If you are ever wondering why a post did not go out, this is the answer:

  • Published — a post was created; open it to see how it went out.
  • Skipped — with the reason: inside the cooldown, daily limit reached, conditions did not match, no connected account left to publish to, the template was deleted, or the subscription is inactive.
  • Failed — the rule matched but the post could not be created.
  • Runs are kept for 90 days and then swept, so the history answers "what happened last week", not "what happened last quarter".

Testing a rule

The Test button fires the rule immediately using example stream details, ignoring the cooldown and the daily limit — but nothing else. Your conditions are still evaluated, so a rule that filters on a game the example does not match records a skip rather than posting; and a lapsed subscription skips it too. It publishes for real, so you see exactly what your audience would have seen — check the result in the history and delete the post if it was only a rehearsal. A test that errors is written to the history as a failure, with the reason.

Good to know

  • A workspace has a ceiling on how many rules it can hold — far above what any plan's posting allowance would use. PostRite tells you the number if you ever reach it.
  • Automated posts never wait for approval — the moment they react to is over long before an approver could answer.
  • Automated posts count toward your monthly post allowance like any other post.
  • Disconnecting a channel turns off the rules that used it but keeps them, so you can point them at a channel again later.