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Build a Choose Your Own Adventure Bot in TypeScript

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Temporal TypeScript SDK

WORK IN PROGRESS

This tutorial is a work in progress. Some sections may be incomplete, out of date, or missing. We're working to update it.

Introduction​

In this tutorial, we'll integrate all the knowledge gained from Core and Logging APIs in an end-to-end, complete demo application - which happens to be a Choose Your Own Adventure game that you can play on Discord or Slack!

This project will integrate and give context to your understanding of Temporal SDK APIs: logging with Sinks, Activity dependency injection, Timer and Promise.race design patterns, Signals (and HTTP Servers for them), Polling patterns, and continueAsNew for indefinitely long running Workflows.

Skip ahead

View the completed project on GitHub: https://github.com/JoshuaKGoldberg/temporal-adventure-bot

Let's dive in!

Prerequisites​

Project Requirements​

  • On /instructions, posts instructions to Slack/Discord and pins the message
  • Continuously runs the game until it reaches an end state:
    • Every day, post the current entry as a poll
    • Wait until the earlier of:
      • Every day, check the poll results
        • If there is consensus, determine next state
        • If no consensus, remind people to vote
      • Allow an admin to /force a choice any time
  • Report important game updates to a specified logger

00:00 Project Intro and Demo 03:30 Temporal Worker - Activity Dependency Injection 07:00 Temporal Sinks for Logging 08:00 Temporal Client 10:50 RunGame Workflow and Game Logic 13:45 Async Race Design Pattern: Timers vs Humans 15:00 Design Pattern: Polling 18:05 Signals 20:00 HTTP Server for Signal 23:00 ContinueAsNew

Overview​

Worker​

The Temporal Worker is set up in src/worker.ts. It uses two common Temporal patterns:

  • Dependency Injection: using the integration object created by createIntegration to provide APIs for the social platform being targeted (Discord or Slack) (see Platforms)
  • Logging Sinks: providing a logger.sink method for the Workflows to log out to console.log

Client​

The client in src/client.ts will ask Temporal to run two different Workflows:

  1. instructions: Posts instructions to the social platform and pins the message
  2. runGame: Continuously runs the game state until the game is finished

runGame​

Each iteration of the game (so, daily), runGame goes through these steps:

  1. If the entry has no options, the game is over
  2. Post the current entry as a poll
  3. Check and remind people to vote once a day until either...
    • ...a choice is made by consensus
    • ...an admin forces a choice
  4. If the choice was forced by an admin, mention that
  5. Continue with that chosen next step in the game

Platforms​

The platformFactory function used in both workers and Workflows reads from process.env to return the createIntegration and createServer methods for the social platform being targeted.

Integrations​

createIntegration: creates the client API used to send messages to the social platform. For example, the Slack integration uses the Slack Bolt SDK.

Servers​

createServer creates the (generally Express) server that runs locally and receives webhook events from the social platform. Both the Discord and Slack servers use Ngrok to expose a local port on the public web, so that a /force command configured on the platform sends a message, it can Signal to the Workflow.