Note: Hatchet is in early development. Changes are not guaranteed to be backwards-compatible. If you'd like to run Hatchet in production, feel free to reach out on Discord for tips.

Hatchet is a self-hostable workflow engine built for application developers.

What is a workflow?

The term workflow tends to be overloaded, so let's make things more clear - in Hatchet, a workflow is a set of functions which are executed in response to an external trigger (an event, schedule, or API call). For example, if you'd like to send notifications to a user after they've signed up, you could create a workflow for that.

Why is that useful?

Instead of processing background tasks and functions in your application handlers, which can lead to complex code, hard-to-debug errors, and resource contention, you can distribute these workflows between a set of workers. Workers are long-running processes which listen for events, and execute the functions defined in your workflows.

What is a workflow engine?

A workflow engine orchestrates the execution of workflows. It schedules workflows on workers, retries failed workflows, and provides integrations for monitoring and debugging workflows.

Hatchet has the following high-level goals:

1. Serve application developers: we aim to support a broad set of languages and frameworks, to make it easier to support your existing applications. We currently support a Go SDK, with more languages coming soon.
2. Simple to setup: we've seen too many overengineered stacks built on a fragile task queue with overly complex infrastructure. Hatchet is designed to be simple to setup, run locally, and deploy to your own infrastructure.
3. Flexibility when you need it: as your application grows, you can use Hatchet to support complex, multi-step distributed workflows. Hatchet's backend is modular, allowing for customizing the implementation of the event storage API, queueing system, authentication, and more.

Currently implemented

• ✅ Declarative workflows: use the Go SDK to define workflows, with support for timeouts and parallel execution.
• ✅ Cron schedules: schedule workflows using a crontab syntax, like */15 * * * * (every 15 minutes).
• ✅ Events API: store events in a durable event log, with support for querying and filtering events. Define which events trigger which workflows.
• ✅ Web UI: use the web UI to monitor and debug your workflows and events.
• ✅ Self-hostable: MIT-licensed and Docker images available.
• ✅ Locally runnable: see here for an example.
• ✅ Organize workflows using services: use worker.NewService to organize your workflows.

Near-term roadmap

• 🚧 Helm chart for Kubernetes deployments
• 🚧 UI and CLI for creating, updating, and deleting workflows
• 🚧 Better support for parallel step execution
• 🚧 More integrations

To get started, see the Hatchet documentation here.

Please submit any bugs that you encounter via Github issues. However, please reach out on Discord before submitting a feature request - as the project is very early, we'd like to build a solid foundation before adding more complex features.

See the contributing docs here, and please let us know what you're interesting in working on in the #contributing channel on Discord. This will help us shape the direction of the project and will make collaboration much easier!