Workflows

Workflows provide fault-tolerant code execution by handling failures and interruptions gracefully through automatic retries and state persistence. Despite network failures, timeouts, infrastructure outages, and other transient errors, your code just works.

The key to unbreakable workflows is to breakdown the flow into durable steps, ensuring that the workflow can resume from the last successful step in case of failure.

How to define a workflow

Stepkit exports multiple drivers offering different storage and orchestration strategies.

• In-Memory Driver - Stores state in memory (ephemeral)
• File System Driver - Stores state on local disk
• Inngest Driver - Stores state on Inngest platform

Each driver exposes the same API to create workflows but might offer different step APIs for custom steps.

const client = new Client({
  driver: new InMemoryDriver(),
});

Create a workflow

Workflows are regular code. Write code and use libraries like you normally would.

Workflows suspend at each step until it completes, when you call sleep(), or when a failure happens. Each step's return value gets stored. When the workflow resumes, it skips completed steps and uses their stored results.

Workflows take a first parameter which is an object with the workflow id and an optional input schema. The inputSchema is used to validate the input to the workflow when it is invoked.

const workflow = client.workflow(
  {
    id: "my-workflow",
    // optional input schema
    inputSchema: z.object({ name: z.string() }),
  },

);

Add steps to a workflow

The second parameter of a workflow is a function that has a context object and step object as parameters. The context object is used to access the input to the workflow and the step argument is used to orchestrate steps within the workflow.

You can read more about steps in the steps documentation.

const workflow = client.workflow(
  {
    id: "my-workflow",
  },
  async ({ input }, step) => {
    // This step will run when the workflow is invoked
    await step.run("my-step", async () => {
      return { name: input.data.name };
    });
  }
);

Invoke a workflow

Workflows are invoked by calling the startWorkflow method on the client. The method takes the workflow you want to invoke as the first argument and the input to the workflow as the second argument.

const result = await client.startWorkflow(workflow, { name: "John" });

It is that simple to create and start building with workflows. You can look more into available drivers in the drivers documentation.