little-durable-objects

A small, provider-neutral durable-object runtime. Modal is the first sandbox provider; actor state is stored as NDJSON in regional GCS buckets and coordination lives in Postgres.

Install

Install the TypeScript API in actor and workflow projects:

pnpm add little-durable-objects

Install the Rust runtime from crates.io:

cargo install little-durable-objects --locked

Container builds can copy the binary from us-central1-docker.pkg.dev/fluid-analogy-473415-c2/public/little-durable-objects:latest. The image is a runtime base, not a complete actor sandbox: actor images also need Node.js, the project code, and little-durable-objects in the project's dependencies.

Quickstart

Create a Postgres database and one GCS STANDARD bucket. Give the service account in GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS object access to the bucket.

Build the Rust runtime and TypeScript package:

pnpm install
pnpm build
chmod +x npm/dist/providers/modalCli.js

Start the control plane. Its HTTP origin serves the public REST API and the internal host gRPC API, so it must be reachable from Modal with HTTP/2 enabled.

export DURABLE_OBJECT_PROCESS_ROLE=control_plane
export DURABLE_OBJECT_POSTGRES_URL='postgresql://localhost/durable_objects?sslmode=disable'
export DURABLE_OBJECT_STANDARD_BUCKETS='{"north-america-east":"my-actor-state-bucket"}'
export GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS=/path/to/service-account.json
export DURABLE_OBJECT_CONTROL_PLANE_BIND=0.0.0.0:7100
export DURABLE_OBJECT_CONTROL_PLANE_URL=https://objects.example.com
export DURABLE_OBJECT_JWT_SIGNING_KEY="$(openssl genpkey -algorithm Ed25519 -outform DER | base64 | tr -d '\n')"
export DURABLE_OBJECT_ADMIN_TOKEN="$(openssl rand -hex 32)"
export DURABLE_OBJECT_SANDBOX_PROVIDER=modal
export DURABLE_OBJECT_SANDBOX_COMMAND="$PWD/npm/dist/providers/modalCli.js"
export MODAL_TOKEN_ID=...
export MODAL_TOKEN_SECRET=...

./target/release/little-durable-objects

Export actors from src/durable-objects.ts in your project:

import { Actor } from "little-durable-objects"

export class Counter extends Actor {
  count = 0
  async increment(): Promise<number> {
    return ++this.count
  }
}

From your trusted backend, call the JSON API using Authorization: Bearer $DURABLE_OBJECT_ADMIN_TOKEN:
```
PUT  /v1/namespaces/{namespaceId}/deployment
POST /v1/namespaces/{namespaceId}/workflow-tokens
```
The deployment call atomically ensures the namespace and registers its active deployment. Its body is { "codeRevision", "imageRef", "workingDirectory", "actorEntrypoint" }. The workflow-token body is { "executionId", "deadlineUnixMs", "storageRegion" }.

storageRegion selects the home region only when an actor is first created. Later invocations route over gRPC to the actor's existing host region.

image_ref is a Modal image containing Node.js, your built project, its dependencies, and little-durable-objects at /usr/local/bin/little-durable-objects.

Give the issued project token to the workflow and call the actor. The package sends an authenticated JSON POST to the control plane:

import { configureDurableObjects } from "little-durable-objects"
import { Counter } from "./durable-objects.js"

configureDurableObjects({
  token: process.env.DURABLE_OBJECT_TOKEN!,
  namespaceId: "my-project",
  controlPlaneUrl: "https://objects.example.com",
})

await Counter.get("account-1").increment()

Actors leave memory after 60 seconds idle; empty host sandboxes stop after 5 minutes. Override those defaults with DURABLE_OBJECT_ACTOR_IDLE_TIMEOUT_MS and DURABLE_OBJECT_HOST_IDLE_TIMEOUT_MS on the control plane.

See the architecture diagram for the request, credential, placement, and state flow.

Release maintainers should follow the release guide.

little-durable-objects 0.1.3

little-durable-objects

Install

Quickstart

License