Documentation v0.22.5 Concepts Activities

Activities

Activities are the fundamental building blocks of work within an Obelisk workflow . They represent individual, idempotent operations that perform a specific task, typically a network activity. Think of them as the "verbs" of your workflow - the interactions with real world that get things done. Activities are executed at least once for resiliency.

Key Characteristics of Activities

Developing an Activity in Rust

In this contrived example we will create an activity that does not communicate with an external system. Its purpose is to show all the basic steps needed to execute an activity. Install Rust, cargo-generate and run:

cargo generate obeli-sk/obelisk-templates fibo/activity --name myactivity
cd myactivity

This will generate a directory with the following structure:

.
├── Cargo.toml
├── obelisk.toml
├── README.md
├── rust-toolchain.toml
├── src
│   └── lib.rs
└── wit
    ├── deps
    │   └── template-fibo_activity
    │       └── fibo.wit
    └── impl.wit

First let's look at the fibo.wit - a WIT interface with a single function.

package template-fibo:activity;

interface fibo-activity-ifc {
    fibo: func(n: u8) -> u64;
}

The other WIT file - impl.wit - exports this interface:

package any:any;

world any {
    export template-fibo:activity/fibo-activity-ifc;
}

Obelisk disregards namespace, package name and the world name - it only concerns itself with the exported interface(s). The world can be though of as an ESModule with no code - just imports and exports.

Let's look at the (naive) implementation found in lib.rs:

impl Guest for Component {
    fn fibo(n: u8) -> u64 {
        if n <= 1 {
            n.into()
        } else {
            Self::fibo(n - 1) + Self::fibo(n - 2)
        }
    }
}

The configuration file obelisk.toml already includes the activity:

[[activity_wasm]]
name = "myactivity"
location.path = "target/wasm32-wasip2/release/myactivity.wasm"

Let's build the WASM Component and run Obelisk.

cargo build --release
obelisk server run --config ./obelisk.toml

In order to execute the activity, we can use the CLI or the Web UI. In either case, we need the FFQN and the function parameters:

obelisk client execution submit --follow \
    template-fibo:activity/fibo-activity-ifc.fibo [10]

Publishing the WASM Component

We can push the WASM file into an OCI registry with this command:

obelisk client component push \
    target/wasm32-wasip2/release/myactivity.wasm \
    docker.io/youraccount/yourimage:tag

Obelisk will output the OCI location together with its SHA digest. This can be used instead of the file location in obelisk.toml:

 [[activity_wasm]]
 name = "myactivity"
-location.path = "target/wasm32-wasip2/release/myactivity.wasm"
+location.oci = "docker.io/getobelisk/example_activity_fibo_template:2025-01-30@sha256:f67904dd6d30bc4ca9bf844d41b6c11b146ebf66adaf05a2088e2a5f7fa46d29"

Follow the template's README for more details.

Using HTTP Client

Activities can make HTTP requests using the WASI 0.2 HTTP client. This allows them to interact with external services and APIs. Importantly, this HTTP client is controlled, with built-in tracing to enhance security and predictability. Disk I/O is currently not permitted.

Let's generate a simple HTTP Client from a template:

cargo generate obeli-sk/obelisk-templates http-simple/activity --name httpactivity
cd httpactivity

This will generate a directory with the following structure:

.
├── .cargo
│   └── config.toml
├── Cargo.toml
├── obelisk.toml
├── README.md
├── rust-toolchain.toml
├── src
│   └── lib.rs
└── wit
    ├── deps
    │   └── template-http_activity
    │       └── http-get.wit
    └── impl.wit

The WIT interface is stored in http-get.wit:

package template-http:activity;

interface http-get {
    get: func(url: string) -> result<string, string>;
}

Instead of using the WASI HTTP 0.2 bindings directly we can use the waki HTTP client.

impl Guest for Component {
    fn get(url: String) -> Result<String, String> {
        let resp = waki::Client::new()
            .get(&url)
            .connect_timeout(Duration::from_secs(1))
            .send()
            .map_err(|err| format!("{err:?}"))?;
        let body = resp.body().map_err(|err| format!("{err:?}"))?;
        Ok(String::from_utf8_lossy(&body).into_owned())
    }
}

#[cfg(test)]
mod tests {
    #[test]
    fn integration_test() {
        let url = std::env::var("TEST_URL").expect("TEST_URL must be set");
        let body = Component::get(url).unwrap();
        println!("body: {body}");
    }
}

We can build, run and publish the WASM Component the same way as previously. See the http-simple template for details on how to run the integration test.

If you need to use GraphQL, check out the cynic crate and the following template.

For more advanced use cases that require async support please check out the wstd crate.

Logging, debugging, testing

To understand the internal state of an activity, you can use the following:

Unit and integration testing is possible with Cargo's test harness.

The stargazers demo repository contains unit and integration tests for activities.