hatchet

An orchestration engine for background tasks, AI agents, and durable workflows

Hatchet Cloud · Documentation · Website · Issues

What is Hatchet?

Hatchet is a platform for orchestrating background tasks, AI agents, and durable workflows at scale. It supports applications written in Python, TypeScript, Go and Ruby, and can be used as a service through Hatchet Cloud or self-hosting. Hatchet provides a full platform for queuing, automatic retries, durability, real-time monitoring, alerting, and logging.

Get started quickly

The fastest way to get started with Hatchet is signing up for Hatchet Cloud to try it out! We recommend this even if you plan on self-hosting, so you can have a look at what a fully-deployed Hatchet platform looks like.

To run Hatchet locally, the fastest path for setup is to install the Hatchet CLI (on MacOS, Linux or WSL) - note that this requires Docker installed locally to work:

curl -fsSL https://install.hatchet.run/install.sh | bash
hatchet --version
hatchet server start

To view full documentation for self-hosting and using cloud, have a look at the docs.

When should I use Hatchet?

You can use Hatchet for running background tasks, AI agents, or other types of long-running workflows. It is designed to be a feature-complete solution for systems where correctness, reliability, horizontal scalability, and observability are essential. From a technical perspective, it differs from other solutions in that it uses Postgres as a durability layer for both the task runtime and the observability system, making it particularly easy to self-host.

For some end-to-end examples of workflows you can build with Hatchet, check out our cookbooks.

Hatchet Features

Background Tasks

• Background tasks: Hatchet supports one-off background tasks defined as simple functions. It supports both fire-and-forget and fire-and-wait tasks with subscriptions
• Retries: flexible and configurable retry policies for tasks, with optional exponential backoff
• Cron jobs and scheduled runs for scheduling tasks at some point in the future
• Task routing based on strict conditions, like worker labels, or more complex, weighted scheduling rules using worker affinity
• Event-based triggering and listeners to build event-driven, highly distributed systems
• Webhook-based triggering for easily triggering Hatchet tasks from upstream data sources

Task orchestration and workflows

• Durable tasks for building fault-tolerant, long-running workflows which can easily recover from failure
• DAGs (directed acyclic graphs) for building data pipelines and simple workflows. See our guide on choosing between durable tasks and DAGs
• Complex pause/resume conditions using durable sleep, event waits, or a combination of both

Scale

• Priority so that critical tasks can run before tasks which aren't latency sensitive, like backfill jobs
• Rate limiting to deal with third-party APIs, or even to enforce per-user rate limits using dynamic rate limits
• Fair scheduling using Hatchet's concurrency policies, which can set a concurrency limit for tasks based on dynamic keys
• Worker slots for ensuring that workers cannot take on more work than they can handle

Monitoring, observability, and management

• Real-time web UI with alerting, monitoring, and logging
• OpenTelemetry (using Hatchet's built-in collector or external destinations)
• Prometheus metrics
• Multi-tenant by default, so a single Hatchet instance can support multiple teams
• Users and roles

Hatchet Cloud features

• Autoscaling and pay-as-you-go plans
• Multi-region deployments
• SSO
• Improved performance for monitoring, logging, and observability

Documentation

The most up-to-date documentation can be found at https://docs.hatchet.run.

Community & Support

• Discord - best for getting in touch with the maintainers and hanging with the community
• Github Issues - used for filing bug reports
• Github Discussions - used for starting in-depth technical discussions that are suited for asynchronous communication
• Email - best for getting Hatchet Cloud support and for help with billing, data deletion, etc.

Hatchet vs...

Issues

Please submit any bugs that you encounter via GitHub issues.

I'd Like to Contribute

Please let us know what you're interested 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!