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Add DBOS To Your App

This guide shows you how to add the open-source DBOS Transact library to your existing application to durably execute it and make it resilient to any failure.

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Also check out the integration guides for popular TypeScript frameworks:

Using DBOS Transact​

1. Install DBOS​

npm install DBOS into your application. Note that DBOS requires Node.js 20 or later.

npm install @dbos-inc/dbos-sdk@latest

Then, enable TypeScript decorators in your tsconfig.json file:

tsconfig.json
  "compilerOptions": {
    "experimentalDecorators": true,
  }

DBOS requires a Postgres database. If you already have Postgres, you can set the DBOS_DATABASE_URL environment variable to your connection string (later we'll pass that value into DBOS). Otherwise, you can start Postgres in a Docker container with this command:

npx dbos postgres start

2. Initialize DBOS in Your App​

In your app's main entrypoint, add the following code. This initializes DBOS when your app starts.

import { DBOS } from "@dbos-inc/dbos-sdk";

DBOS.setConfig({
  "name": "my-app",
  "databaseUrl": process.env.DBOS_DATABASE_URL
});
await DBOS.launch();

3. Start Your Application​

Try starting your application. If everything is set up correctly, your app should run normally, but log DBOS launched! on startup. Congratulations! You've integrated DBOS into your application.

4. Start Building With DBOS​

At this point, you can add any DBOS decorator or method to your application. For example, you can annotate one of your functions as a workflow and the functions it calls as steps. DBOS durably executes the workflow so if it is ever interrupted, upon restart it automatically resumes from the last completed step.

export class Example {

  @DBOS.step()
  static async myStep(n) {
    DBOS.logger.info(`Step ${n} completed!`);
  }

  @DBOS.workflow()
  static async exampleWorkflow() {
    await Example.myStep(1);
    await Example.myStep(2);
  }
}

To ensure that DBOS registers all decorated functions, declare all DBOS-decorated functions before running await DBOS.launch().

You can add DBOS to your application incrementally—it won't interfere with code that's already there. It's totally okay for your application to have one DBOS workflow alongside thousands of lines of non-DBOS code.

To learn more about programming with DBOS, check out the programming guide.