Trigger.dev TypeScript Background Jobs Platform
Trigger.dev is an open-source platform for building and deploying long-running background tasks, AI agents, and durable workflows in TypeScript. It provides managed infrastructure with retries, queues, real-time observability, and human-in-the-loop support.
Trigger.dev is an open-source platform for building and deploying long-running background tasks, AI agents, and durable workflows in TypeScript. It provides managed infrastructure with retries, queues, real-time observability, and human-in-the-loop support.
npx skills add agentskillexchange/skills --skill trigger-dev-typescript-background-jobs-platform
Trigger.dev is an open-source platform purpose-built for running background jobs, AI agent workflows, and long-running tasks in TypeScript without timeouts or infrastructure management. With over 14,000 GitHub stars and an Apache-2.0 license, it provides a production-grade execution runtime that handles the hard parts of distributed computing: durable execution with automatic retries, priority queues with configurable concurrency, real-time streaming, and comprehensive tracing and logging for every run.
The platform solves a fundamental problem for AI agent developers: serverless environments like AWS Lambda and Vercel Functions impose strict timeout limits that make long-running agent tasks impossible. Trigger.dev removes these constraints entirely, allowing tasks to run for hours or even days with full durability guarantees. If a task fails, it resumes from where it left off rather than restarting from scratch. The SDK (@trigger.dev/sdk on npm) provides a clean TypeScript API for defining tasks with schemas, scheduling, and inter-task dependencies.
Key capabilities for agent workflows include human-in-the-loop waitpoints where execution pauses until a human approves, rejects, or provides feedback; real-time streaming that pipes LLM responses directly to your frontend; batch triggering for parallelizing work across multiple runs; and build extensions that let you bundle system dependencies like browsers, Python runtimes, and FFmpeg into your task containers. The platform supports cron schedules up to one year out, preview branch environments for testing, and multiple deployment stages (DEV, PREVIEW, STAGING, PROD).
Trigger.dev integrates naturally with any TypeScript project. Tasks are defined as regular functions with decorators, deployed via CLI or Git-based workflows, and monitored through a web dashboard with full distributed tracing. React hooks are available for building frontend UIs that interact with running tasks. For AI applications, the combination of durable execution, streaming support, and human-in-the-loop makes Trigger.dev a natural fit for agent orchestration where tasks involve calling external APIs, processing documents, or coordinating multi-step workflows that must not silently fail.