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conductor workflow create gives no success feedback, then 500 error on retry #4

@nthmost-orkes

Description

@nthmost-orkes

Problem

conductor workflow create <file> prints nothing on success — no confirmation that the workflow was registered. A new user following the quickstart has no signal that the command worked.

If they run it a second time (because they weren't sure it worked), they get:

Error: Failed to create workflow: Workflow with hello_workflow.1 already exists! (status: 500)

A 500 status code for "already exists" is surprising. A new user's first instinct is that something is broken.

Steps to reproduce

conductor workflow create workflow.json
# (no output other than "Auto-detected Conductor server at http://localhost:8080")
conductor workflow create workflow.json
# Error: Failed to create workflow: Workflow with hello_workflow.1 already exists! (status: 500)

Fix

  1. conductor-cli: Print a success message on workflow create — e.g., Workflow 'hello_workflow' (version 1) registered successfully.
  2. conductor-cli: If the server returns "already exists," treat it as a non-error (or at minimum return a 409-style message, not a 500 error message)
  3. Server: Consider returning 409 Conflict instead of 500 for duplicate workflow definitions

Affects

  • conductor-oss/conductor-cli (primary fix — success output + error handling)
  • conductor-oss/conductor (server-side status code is a secondary issue)

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    area: readmeMain conductor repo READMEcriticalSeriously impacts zero-to-one onboardingfix: codeFix requires a code change in a repo

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