triggerdotdev/trigger.dev

★ 15,023TypeScriptAudience · developerComplexity · 3/5ActiveLicenseSetup · moderate

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((trigger-dev))
    Inputs
      TypeScript task functions
      Typed payloads
      Cron schedules
    Outputs
      Background job runs
      Logs and traces
      Realtime streams
    Use Cases
      Chained LLM calls
      Video processing
      Scheduled jobs
      Human-in-loop approvals
    Tech Stack
      TypeScript
      Node
      React

mindmap root((trigger-dev)) Inputs TypeScript task functions Typed payloads Cron schedules Outputs Background job runs Logs and traces Realtime streams Use Cases Chained LLM calls Video processing Scheduled jobs Human-in-loop approvals Tech Stack TypeScript Node React

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Why anyone would actually build this

REASON 1

Run chained LLM calls and AI workflows that exceed the timeout limits of Lambda or Vercel

REASON 2

Schedule cron jobs and batch-trigger many runs from a TypeScript codebase

REASON 3

Pause a task until a human approves it using waitpoints, then resume execution

REASON 4

Stream LLM responses and realtime updates to a frontend via React hooks

Stack

TypeScriptNodeReact

Spinning it up

Difficulty · moderate Time to first run · 30min

Quickest path is the hosted cloud at cloud.trigger.dev, self-hosting needs Docker and extra infra configuration.

Apache 2.0: free to use, modify, and redistribute commercially, with a patent grant and attribution required.

Wtf does this do

Trigger.dev is an open-source platform for building and running background jobs and AI workflows written in TypeScript. The README pitches it as a way to write long-running tasks in your own codebase, then deploy them to Trigger.dev's cloud (or self-host) and get retries, queues, monitoring, and automatic scaling included. The main framing is that other places to run code, like AWS Lambda or Vercel serverless functions, cut off tasks after a short timeout. Trigger.dev says it runs your tasks with no timeout, so you can do things like call multiple LLMs in sequence, process video with FFmpeg, run a browser, or execute Python scripts as part of a job. Tasks are checkpointed, which the README says means they survive restarts and can resume where they left off. Developers install the SDK and write a task as a normal TypeScript function with a unique id and a run function that receives a typed payload. The example in the README is a hello-world task that just logs a message. Tasks live in your repo, so they go through version control, local testing, and code review like the rest of your code. The feature list is long. It includes scheduled cron jobs, realtime updates and LLM response streaming to a frontend through React hooks, batch triggering of many runs, structured input and output schemas, waits and waitpoints for pausing a task until a human approves it, concurrency and queue controls, and separate Development, Staging, Preview, and Production environments. Each run has full tracing, logs, tags, metadata, and configurable error alerts. The README also points to a hosted cloud at cloud.trigger.dev as the quickest way to get started, with self-hosting documented as an alternative. The project is licensed Apache 2.0.

Yoink these prompts

Prompt 1

Write a Trigger.dev task that calls OpenAI three times in sequence and streams the final result to a Next.js frontend

Prompt 2

Set up a Trigger.dev scheduled cron task that runs every hour and processes new rows from a Postgres queue

Prompt 3

Self-host Trigger.dev with Docker and connect it to my existing TypeScript repo of tasks

Prompt 4

Add a waitpoint to a Trigger.dev task so it pauses until an admin approves the run from a Slack message

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