Tasks Workflows Orchestration API and Runners.

This repository is part of the Joyent Triton project. See the contribution guidelines -- Triton does not use GitHub PRs -- and general documentation at the main Triton project page.

Repository: git://github.com/joyent/node-workflow.git
Browsing: https://github.com/joyent/node-workflow
Who: Pedro Palazón Candel, Trent Mick, Mark Cavage, Josh Wilsdon, Rob Gulewich, Andrés Rodríguez, Fred Kuo.
Docs: http://joyent.github.io/node-workflow/
Tickets/bugs: https://github.com/joyent/node-workflow/issues

Installation

npm install wf

Overview

If you are building a completely new system composed of many discrete API applications, each of them with a clearly defined area of responsibility, or if you are trying to assemble a collaboration channel between a heterogeneous set of unrelated API applications, you need a means to orchestrate interactions between these applications.

A workflow is effectively an orchestration. It gives you a way to decompose a complex series of operations down to a sequence of discrete tasks within a state machine.

The sequence of tasks is more complex than just a series. Tasks can fail, and so you need to deal with timeouts, retries, "stuck" flows, and so forth.

One way to define a workflow and its tasks is using an arbitrarily-complex language. Or you can keep it simple by making some assumptions:

Code is the definition language.
Tasks are independent. Can be used into different workflows.
The only way to communicate between tasks is the workflow. Tasks can add, remove or modify properties of the workflow.
If a task requires a specific property of the workflow to be present, the task can fail, or re-schedule itself within the workflow, or ...

wf

This package provides a way to define re-usable workflows using JSON and run concrete jobs with specific targets and parameters based on such workflows.

Workflow Runners

In order to execute jobs, at least one WorkflowRunner must be up and ready to take jobs. An arbitrary number of runners can be used on any set of hosts; their configuration must match.

An example WorkflowRunner is provided with the package and can be started with:

./bin/workflow-runner path/to/config.json

(The test directory contains the file config.json.sample which can be used as reference).

You can create workflows and jobs either by using the provided REST API(s), or by embedding this module's API into your own system(s). The former will be easier to get up and running, but you should use the latter when:

You want to use the Workflow API in a (node.js) application that is not the bundled REST API.
You want to use a different backend storage system, or otherwise change the assumptions of the bundled REST API.

The package also provides a binary file to run the WorkflowAPI using the same configuration file we pass to our WorkflowRunner:

./bin/workflow-api path/to/config.json

See demo section below for more details about both approaches.

Development

Clone the repo and build the deps:

git clone git://github.com/joyent/node-workflow.git
cd node-workflow
make all

Note make all will setup all the required dependencies, node modules and run make check and make test. In order to just setup node modules, make setup is enough.

To run the Workflow API server:

./bin/workflow-api path/to/config.json

To run a Job Runner:

./bin/workflow-runner path/to/config.json

Note that it's fine to run more than one Runner, either on the same or different machines, so long as they have access to the same storage backend.

Testing

make test

Pre-commit git hook

In order to run make prepush before every commit, add the following to a file called .git/hooks/pre-commit and chmod +x it:

#!/bin/sh
# Run make prepush before allow commit

set -e

make prepush

exit 0

If you've made a change that does not affect source code files, but (for example) only docs, you can skip this hook by passing the option --no-verify to the git commit command.

Demo

The workflow-example repository contains everything needed to illustrate:

An example config file config.json.sample which should be renamed to config.json, and modified to properly match your local environment.

Remember that, in order to process any job the workflow-runner needs to be initialized pointing to the aforementioned configuration file:

./node_modules/.bin/workflow-runner config.json

Also, in order to be able to run the API-based example mentioned below, the workflow-api HTTP server needs to be up and running too:

./node_modules/.bin/workflow-api config.json

Contents for the other files within the workflow-example repository are:

An example of how to use node-workflow as a node module in order to create workflows, queue jobs and wait for the results. See module.js.
An example of how to achieve the same goal using the Workflow API instead of the node module. See api.js.
Both examples share the same workflow definition, contained in the file shared-workflow.js. The beginning of the aforementioned files can be useful to understand the differences when trying to create a workflow using these different approaches.
Finally, this directory also contains the file node.js, which does exactly the same thing as the workflow/job does -- create and star a gist using your github's username and password -- but straight from node.js. This file is useful in order to understand the differences between writing code to be executed by node.js directly, and using it to create workflows and the associated tasks. Remember, code within tasks runs sandboxed using Node's VM API and that tasks are totally independent.

See also example.js for more options when defining workflows and the different possibilities for task fallbacks, retries, timeouts, ...

Repository

deps/           Git submodules and/or commited 3rd-party deps.
                See "node_modules/" for node.js deps.
docs/           Project docs (restdown)
lib/            Source files.
node_modules/   Node.js deps, either populated at build time or commited.
pkg/            Package lifecycle scripts
test/           Test suite (using node-tap)
tools/          Miscellaneous dev/upgrade/deployment tools and data.
Makefile
package.json    npm module info
README.md

TODO

See https://github.com/joyent/node-workflow/issues.

LICENSE

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

KamuelaFranco/node-workflow