Writing Durable code

A workflow is a plain PHP class. No base class, no interface, no framework type in its signature. What makes it durable is that the engine replays it from a journal, so the only rule that really binds is determinism.

The three shapes

#[AsWorkflow('checkout')]                       // the name the cluster knows
final class CheckoutWorkflow
{
    public function __construct(
        private readonly WorkflowEnvironment $environment,
    ) {}

    #[AsWorkflowMethod]                          // exactly one per workflow class
    public function run(string $orderId): string
    {
        $orders = $this->environment->activityStub(OrderActivities::class);

        $receipt = $this->environment->await($orders->charge($orderId));
        $this->environment->sleep(Duration::seconds(30), 'cooling down');

        return $this->environment->await($orders->notify($receipt));
    }
}

interface OrderActivities                        // the CONTRACT carries the names
{
    #[AsActivityMethod(name: 'shop.order.charge')]
    public function charge(string $orderId): string;
}

final class DoctrineOrderActivities implements OrderActivities   // the HANDLER does the work
{
    public function charge(string $orderId): string { /* real side effects here */ }
}

#[AsNexusService('billing')]                     // another team, another deployment
interface BillingContract
{
    #[AsNexusOperation('check')]
    public function check(string $order, int $amountInCents, string $currency): array;
}

Never write an activity name as a string at the call site. The stub reads the contract's attributes, so the name lives in exactly one place. This is the single most common way to break an existing workflow: rename the method, keep the attribute, and running executions still find their activity.

The rule that binds: the workflow body is replayed

Everything in a #[AsWorkflowMethod] runs again, from the top, every time the engine resumes the execution — possibly in another process, days later. So the body must give the same answers when replayed:

An activity is where non-determinism belongs. It runs once per attempt, its result is written to the journal, and on replay the journal answers instead of the code.

⚠ An activity is retried; write it so a second attempt is safe. The engine guarantees the result is recorded once, not that your side effect is. Charging a card twice is a business incident, not a framework bug.

Waiting

Everything schedulable returns an Awaitable. Nothing happens until you await it — which is also how you get parallelism:

$a = $stub->reserve($order);                     // scheduled, not awaited
$b = $stub->quote($order);
[$reserved, $quoted] = $this->environment->await($this->environment->all($a, $b));

$first = $this->environment->await($this->environment->any($a, $b));
$twoOfThree = $this->environment->await($this->environment->some(2, $a, $b, $c));

await() takes an optional deadline: await($awaitable, Duration::minutes(5)).

Reference files

Read the one you need, not all three:

• references/workflows.md — signals, updates, child workflows, timers, continueAsNew, versioning, and how an execution is started (never inline in a web request).
• references/activities.md — ActivityOptions, retry policy, the four timeouts, non-retryable exceptions, heartbeats, cancellation.
• references/nexus.md — Nexus contracts, why a contract splits in two when a workflow fulfils an operation, and the payload trap that fails silently.
• references/migrations.md — read this before touching existing code. Coming off the Temporal PHP SDK, or moving from one Durable version to the next: gplanchat/durable-rector does the rewriting, and the reference is mostly about the five things its rules refuse to guess. Two mistakes raise no error on a server that is already running: a workflow or activity type name that changes, so runs in flight stop resolving, and a catch on ApplicationFailure, ServerFailure, TerminatedFailure or TimeoutFailure, SDK failures with no Durable counterpart, which never matches after the migration. The migration marks every reference to those four failures (a catch, a parameter or return type included) and every activity name it cannot carry over with a durable-rector: comment. A workflow name gets no marker when the SDK attribute sits on the class itself, when Rector cannot load the class, or when the class already carries #[AsWorkflow], which keeps its name whatever the SDK type was: check those by hand.

Before you hand the code back

• One #[AsWorkflowMethod] per workflow class, and the class is declared to the host (Symfony/Sylius autoconfigure it; Magento lists it in di.xml).
• Every activity call goes through a stub built from a contract — no string names.
• Nothing non-deterministic in the workflow body.
• Every timer has a summary: it is what names the row in the observation timeline, and TimerScheduled tells an operator nothing at 3am.
• The workflow does not catch what it cannot compensate. An unhandled failure ends the execution and is visible; a swallowed one leaves an order half-processed and silent.