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A Working Environment for This Tutorial

The previous section mentioned the various background knowledge assumed in later sections. This section gives specific instructions for preparing a local environment where you can experiment with the features of ZIO-Temporal for yourself as you read along.

To try the examples in this tutorial, you will need the ZIO-Temporal library as well as a running Temporal server. There are different ways to get these, but here some suggestions.

Install Scala, Java, and SBT​

You must have Scala and SBT available, as well as the Java Development Kit. The examples in this tutorial were tested with Scala version 3 and Java version 17.

There are multiple ways to install Scala, SBT, and Java described on the Scala official website. The easiest is probably to use Coursier, which can install all Scala development components with a single setup command. Complete installation instructions are on the Coursier website.

Install the Temporal Server​

The Temporal server binary can be downloaded for Linux or Windows, or installed on macOS using brew install temporal. Detailed instructions are on the Temporal.io website.

Once you have it installed, simply run the server with this command:

temporal server start-dev

It runs in the foreground (by default), so run it in its own terminal session. Confirm it’s online by pointing your browser to your localhost port 8233.

Access the ZIO-Temporal Library​

ZIO-Temporal applications depend on the ZIO-Temporal library. The Scala build tool SBT can manage library dependencies. As mentioned earlier, the build file is named build.sbt and it goes in the root folder of the project. The Scala source files go in the folder src/main/scala under the project root.

Configuration for the build goes in the build.sbt file, and we already showed an example of configuring the Scala version with a key-value pair:

scalaVersion := "3.5.1"

The := operator above assigns the value on the right to the configuration setting named on the left. Similarly, you can configure the project’s library dependencies using the libraryDependencies key. The operator += will add the value on the right to a collection named on the left. To add multiple values (the library dependencies) you can use the ++= operator applied to a collection of values on the right, in this case a Seq:

libraryDependencies ++= Seq(
  "com.guizmaii" %% "zio-temporal-core" % "1.0.0-RC3",
  "org.slf4j" % "slf4j-nop" % "2.0.16",
)

Placing this setting in the build.sbt file will add two library dependencies to the project: (1) the ZIO-Temporal development kit, and (2) a no operation SLF4J Logger that will silence most of the logging output when running the project. If you prefer to see the output, feel free to replace this dependency with slf4j-simple, logback-classic, or your favorite SLF4J logging framework provider.

With sbt configured to manage the library dependencies, you can compile the project with the command sbt compile, run it with sbt run, and open an interactive REPL session with sbt console. The command sbt without arguments will open an interactive session that will recognize the compile, run, and console commands directly.

Now that you have your tutorial environment set up, our first topic will be how to define a Temporal Workflow. After that we will create and run a Temporal Worker that will be listening and waiting for a command to execute the Workflow. Then we will learn how to issue the command to Execute the Temporal Workflow programmatically, and see how to accept complex Workflow parameters in JSON format. The final section in the tutorial will show how to include Activity Tasks in a Workflow Execution.

This is a build.sbt file that will work for all the examples in this tutorial:

build.sbt
scalaVersion := "3.5.1"

libraryDependencies ++= Seq(
  "com.guizmaii" %% "zio-temporal-core" % "1.0.0-RC3",
  "dev.zio"    %% "zio-json"          % "0.7.3",
  "org.slf4j"   % "slf4j-nop"         % "2.0.16",
)

Now that you have your working environment set up we can begin the main tutorial content. In the next section we will learn how to define a Temporal Workflow.