Finist

Redis based Finite State Machine.

Description

Finist is a finite state machine that is defined and persisted in Redis.

Community

Meet us on IRC: #lesscode on freenode.net.

Related projects

• Finist implemented in Ruby
• Finist implemented in Rust

Usage

You need to supply a Redis client. There are no restrictions regarding the type of the Redis client, but it must respond to call and the signature must be identical to that of RESP.

local resp = require("resp")
local client = resp.new("127.0.0.1", 6379)

local finist = require("finist")

-- Initialize with a Redis client, the name of the machine and the
-- initial state. In this example, the machine is called "order" and
-- the initial status is "pending". The Redis client is connected to
-- the default host (127.0.0.1:6379).
local machine = finist.new(resp, "order", "pending")

Now you can define the available transitions:

-- Available transitions are defined with the `on` method
-- `machine:on(<event>, <initial_state>, <final_state>)`
machine:on("approve", "pending", "approved")
machine:on("cancel", "pending", "cancelled")
machine:on("cancel", "approved", "cancelled")
machine:on("reset", "cancelled", "pending")

Now that the possible transitions are defined, we can check the current state:

machine:state()
# => "pending"

And we can trigger an event:

machine:trigger("approve")
# => true, "approved"

The trigger method returns two values: the first represents the current state, and the second represents whether a transition occurred.

Here's what happens if an event doesn't cause a transition:

machine:trigger("reset")
# => false, "approved"

Here's a convenient way to use this flag:

local state, changed = machine:trigger("reset")

if changed then
  print("State changed to " .. state)
end

If you need to remove all the transitions for a given event, you can use rm:

machine:rm("reset")

Note that every change is persisted in Redis.

Installation

You need to have lsocket installed, then just copy finist.lua anywhere in your package.path.

A packages file is provided in case you want to use pac to install the dependencies. Follow the instructions in pac's documentation to get started.