GoWind Flow Process Engine

GoWind Flow (Chuan Liu) is the lightweight workflow engine of the go-wind family: BPMN 2.0 compatible, a persistent Token state machine, a zero-dependency core, and pluggable script engines. It aligns with the commonly used subset of Flowable / Camunda / Activiti and, as a pure Go library, embeds mature process orchestration capabilities into any service. The project is open source under the MIT license; the current version is v0.2.0.

Design philosophy: the engine manages process flow; scripts manage everything beyond the flow.

• BPMN 2.0 compatible subset — aligned with the commonly used subset of Flowable / Camunda / Activiti; the repository provides a full compatibility matrix (docs/bpmn_compat)
• Persistent Token state machine — process instance state is persisted as Tokens, so execution can continue after a service restart
• Zero-dependency core — the core introduces no third-party dependencies; storage and script engines are both pluggable and replaceable
• Pluggable script engines — business logic lives in scripts, integrated with the 9 script engines of go-scripts through contrib

1. Origin and Current Status

GoWind Flow was extracted and generalized from the approval flow engines of go-wind-oa / go-wind-im, distilling the approval workflow capabilities repeatedly refined in those two business products into an independent engine.

Note the distinction from the workflow engine adapters in go-wind-plugins (Temporal / Argo / Conductor / GoWorkflows): those are adapter plugins for third-party engines, while flow is the family's own lightweight engine.

The relationship with the host products, stated as it is:

• Migration is still being planned — the plan is to migrate OA / IM to flow in four phases using the "strangler-fig pattern"; see docs/oa_im_migration in the repository for the migration roadmap
• No host product references it yet — OA / IM still use their respective built-in approval engines; flow has not yet been adopted by any product

Version trajectory: the project debuted with v0.1.0 (M0 core skeleton) on 2026-10-30; the current version is v0.2.0, in a period of rapid iteration.

2. Quick Start

Use it as an embedded Go library — after go get, three steps complete a full flow execution:

go get github.com/tx7do/go-wind-flow

2.1 The Three-Step Usage

1. Create the engine — flow.New(WithStore(...), WithImporters(bpmn.Importer{})): choose the storage implementation and register the BPMN importer
2. Deploy the process definition — Deploy deploys a BPMN process definition; definitions are immutable and automatically versioned
3. Start and drive — Start starts a process instance; CompleteTask completes tasks to advance the flow

2.2 Example Code (Illustrative)

package main

// Illustrative: consult the repository README for the exact import paths and option signatures
import "github.com/tx7do/go-wind-flow"

func main() {
    // ① Create the engine: choose a storage implementation (ent / gorm / memory) and register the BPMN importer
    engine := flow.New(
        WithStore(/* ... */),
        WithImporters(bpmn.Importer{}),
    )

    // ② Deploy the process definition (immutable, automatically versioned)
    engine.Deploy(ctx, leaveApproval)

    // ③ Start a process instance / complete tasks
    instance, _ := engine.Start(ctx, "leave-approval", variables)
    _ = engine.CompleteTask(ctx, taskID, taskVars)
}

The above is illustrative code for the three-step usage; for complete runnable examples, see the repository's examples/ and README.

3. Architecture Components

The engine can either be called directly as an embedded library or deployed independently as a gRPC service via server/, depending on your architectural preference.

4. Capabilities

Version status: iterating rapidly after v0.2.0; some capabilities remain in an Unreleased state — refer to the repository CHANGELOG.

5. Performance Baseline

The following are benchmark figures from the repository:

Actual performance depends on the storage medium and process complexity; we recommend benchmarking against your own business processes.

6. Repository and Documentation

• Repository: tx7do/go-wind-flow (MIT)
• The tutorial section is under construction; for now, refer to the repository's topical documents:

Related Documentation

• GoWind Framework Overview