hferentschik/temporalite

An experimental distribution of Temporal that runs as a single process

Temporalite

⚠️ This project is experimental and not suitable for production use. ⚠️

Temporalite is a distribution of Temporal that runs as a single process with zero runtime dependencies.

Persistence to disk and an in-memory mode are both supported via SQLite.

Check out this video for a brief introduction and demo: youtu.be/Hz7ZZzafBoE [16:13] -- demo starts at 11:28

Why

The primary goal of Temporalite is to make it simple and fast to run Temporal locally or in testing environments.

Features that align with this goal:

• Easy setup and teardown
• Fast startup time
• Minimal resource overhead: no dependencies on a container runtime or database server
• Support for Windows, Linux, and macOS
• Ships with a web interface

Getting Started

Download and Start Temporal Server Locally

Build from source using go install:

Note: Go 1.18 or greater is currently required.

go install github.com/temporalio/temporalite/cmd/temporalite@latest

Start Temporal server:

temporalite start --namespace default

At this point you should have a server running on localhost:7233 and a web interface at http://localhost:8233.

Use CLI

Use Temporal's command line tool tctl to interact with the local Temporalite server.

tctl namespace list
tctl workflow list

Configuration

Use the help flag to see all available options:

temporalite start -h

Namespace Registration

Namespaces can be pre-registered at startup so they're available to use right away:

temporalite start --namespace foo --namespace bar

Registering namespaces the old-fashioned way via tctl --namespace foo namespace register works too!

Persistence Modes

File on Disk

By default temporalite persists state to a file in the current user's config directory. This path may be overridden:

temporalite start -f my_test.db

Ephemeral

An in-memory mode is also available. Note that all data will be lost on each restart.

temporalite start --ephemeral

Web UI

The temporalite binary can be compiled to omit static assets for installations that will never use the UI:

go install -tags headless github.com/temporalio/temporalite/cmd/temporalite@latest

The UI can also be disabled via a runtime flag:

temporalite start --headless

Known Issues

• When consuming Temporalite as a library in go mod, you may want to replace grpc-gateway with a fork to address URL escaping issue in UI. See temporalio#118