Flowstate

Flowstate is a lightweight Go library for building durable, long-running workflows with built-in state persistence, crash recovery, and flow orchestration. Whether you're managing retries, coordinating external services, or executing multi-step business logic, Flowstate ensures your progress is persisted and never lost, even in the face of panics, crashes, or OOMs.

You can even use Flowstate to power real-time applications like games. Watch it in action.

When to Use

Flowstate is a great fit when you need:

• Durable, crash-resistant business workflows
• Retry logic that survives restarts
• Flow coordination without introducing heavyweight workflow engines
• A minimal, embeddable orchestration layer for Go microservices
• Distributed orchestration with persistence

Examples

• Durable execute
• Delayed execute
• Execute with timeout
• Queue
• Money transfer, aka state machine
• Real-time Two-Player Game – GoGame: Live Demo | Video | Source Code.
• UI Demo
• Testcases

Install

go get github.com/makasim/flowstate

Drivers

Flowstate supports multiple persistence backends via a simple driver interface:

• In-memory
• PostgreSQL
• BadgerDB
• Network driver

You can plug in your own driver by implementing the minimal flowstate.Driver interface.

Usage Modes

As a Library

Use Flowstate as an embedded Go library in your applications:

package main

import (
	"log"
	"log/slog"

	"github.com/makasim/flowstate"
	"github.com/makasim/flowstate/memdriver"
)

func main() {
	d := memdriver.New(slog.Default())
	fr := &flowstate.DefaultFlowRegistry{}
	e, err := flowstate.NewEngine(d, fr, slog.Default())
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatalf("cannot create engine: %v", err)
	}

	// Your workflow logic here
}

As a Server with Built-in UI

Run Flowstate as a standalone server with a web UI for monitoring and managing workflows:

go run app/flowstate.go

# Or using Docker
docker run -p 8080:8080 makasim/flowstate

The server works on :8080 and provides:

• netdriver API
• netflow API
• UI

The server could be used as a driver for your applications:

package main

import (
	"log"
	"log/slog"

	"github.com/makasim/flowstate"
	"github.com/makasim/flowstate/netdriver"
)

func main() {
	d := netdriver.New(`http://localhost:8080`)
	fr := &flowstate.DefaultFlowRegistry{}
	e, err := flowstate.NewEngine(d, fr, slog.Default())
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatalf("cannot create engine: %v", err)
	}

	// Your workflow logic here
}

Contributing

Issues, feedback, and PRs are welcome!

License

MIT