Rivet

Overview

Rivet is an open-source, self-hostable orchestrator for agentic workloads. It runs agents, workflows, and sandboxes as durable Actors, with in-memory state, persistence, networking, and scheduling built in. Actors are long-running lightweight processes that can hibernate when idle and scale to zero.

Key Features

• Durable Actors with in-memory state and automatic persistence through SQLite or a BYO database.
• Workflows, queues, and scheduling with automatic retries and durable state across steps.
• Sandboxes with a filesystem, shell, and network for code you did not write.
• HTTP and WebSocket networking, multi-region routing, and end-to-end type safety.
• Typed SDKs for TypeScript, Node.js, Rust, React, and Effect.
• Built-in observability with OpenTelemetry, traces, metrics, structured logs, and an inspector.

Use Cases

• AI agents: each agent runs as its own Actor with persistent context, memory, and scheduled tool calls.
• Sandbox orchestration: coordinate sandbox sessions, queue work, and schedule cleanup in one long-lived Actor per workspace.
• Workflows: multi-step operations with automatic retries, scheduling, and durable state across steps.
• Collaborative documents and chat: each document or room is an Actor broadcasting changes or realtime messages to connected users.

Getting Started

• Install RivetKit with npm install rivetkit.
• Give a coding agent the Rivet skills with npx skills add rivet-dev/skills.
• Start from scratch with quickstarts for Node.js and Bun, React, or Next.js.
• Self-host locally with docker run -p 6420:6420 rivetdev/engine.

Deployment & Requirements

• Run as just a library during development; actors run in your process with no servers or infrastructure.
• Self-host with a single Rust binary or Docker container using Postgres, file system, or FoundationDB.
• Use Postgres or FoundationDB for persistence and tiered storage to S3.
• Supported deployment targets include Docker Compose, Kubernetes, Virtual Machine, AWS ECS, Railway, Render, and custom platforms.
• For BYOC, the control plane runs inside your own VPC and is maintained by Rivet over an outbound connection.

Before You Adopt

• License: Apache-2.0. Review its terms before using, modifying, or distributing the project.
• The Rust client for RivetKit is marked experimental.
• The Python client for RivetKit is marked experimental.
• The 12.3 ms cold start figure uses an experimental Rivet feature that will be enabled by default in an upcoming update.
• With BYOC, the control plane and storage run inside your VPC, your data never leaves your cloud, and there is no inbound management connection.