Orchestra runs business processes modelled as a graph of nodes connected by flows. A running process is advanced by tokens: a token sits on a node, the engine executes that node, and the token is then either consumed, producing new tokens on the outgoing flows, or parked to wait for an external signal. Parallel work is many tokens advancing at once; synchronization is many tokens meeting at a join; a human step simply parks its token until someone completes it.

Design goals

  • Lightweight kernel. The orchestra module is the engine and nothing else: no UI, no editor, no dependencies beyond Drupal core. It runs headless, advancing tokens through a queue on cron.
  • Everything is a plugin. Node behavior (TaskType), routing (FlowCondition, Split, Join), task assignment (Assignment) and timeout actions (TimeoutAction) are all attribute-based plugins. You extend Orchestra by adding plugins, never by patching it.
  • Optional weight in submodules. Human tasks, a browser UI, BPMN and form editors, ECA integration and a cross-site HTTP API are each a submodule you enable only when you need it.
  • Multi-tenant from the start. Every install has one default tenant and behaves exactly like a single-tenant site; isolation into several realms is opt-in.

Features

  • Composable routing. Branching is not a special node type: it falls out of per-flow conditions, a node's split (which live flows to take) and its join (when to fire). The classic gateways (exclusive, parallel, inclusive) are presets over those knobs, and advanced joins ship too: early-firing threshold (N of M), value-aware quorum, and a timeout join that gives up on a slow branch.
  • Human tasks. A parked token becomes a task in an inbox, to be claimed and completed. Tasks are pooled by default or targeted at users, roles or any custom audience through pluggable assignment, support reassignment and delegation, and can be handed off for completion to a built-in review form or to an external site over a signed URL.
  • Content and automation. Bind a process to a content entity and edit it as the work of a step, drive a content entity's moderation state from a process, or run any Drupal Action plugin as automated work.
  • Timeouts and resilience. A parked task can time out (resume, notify, escalate, release a claim) or follow a staged ladder of timers; a deterministically failing step is retried a bounded number of times, then raised as an incident for an operator to resolve, rather than failing the whole process.
  • Distributed execution. A transport-agnostic client contract drives a workflow the same way in-process or on a remote site, over an OAuth-gated HTTP API, so the same caller code runs same-site and cross-site.
  • Visual and form authoring. Edit workflows in BPMN.io through the Modeler API, round-tripping id-stable so running instances are never orphaned, or in accessible Drupal forms without a diagram canvas.
  • Operations and audit. A browser UI plus Views dashboards and bulk operations, a durable tamper-evident audit log, and email notifications on assignment and reminder.
  • ECA integration. Start processes from ECA events, and emit ECA events from process tasks.

Module layout

Module Responsibility
orchestra Engine kernel: entities, plugin types, the engine service and queue worker.
orchestra_inbox Human tasks: assign, claim and complete parked work from an inbox.
orchestra_interaction External-party interactive waits: a public, capability-token-gated dispatcher that lets a non-logged-in party act on a parked step (the customer-facing counterpart of orchestra_inbox).
orchestra_interaction_webform Collect a Webform submission during an interactive wait and resume the workflow on submit, via a single binding element.
orchestra_content Bind a process to a content entity and edit it as the work of a step.
orchestra_content_moderation Drive a content entity's moderation state from a process (a state-transition task).
orchestra_content_eca ECA glue: start a process for an entity, and expose a process's attached entity to ECA.
orchestra_action Run a Drupal Action plugin as automated work in a process.
orchestra_ui Browser UI to start, observe and manage instances.
orchestra_modeler Author workflows visually through the Modeler API (BPMN.io).
orchestra_cm Author workflows in accessible Drupal forms, without a diagram canvas.
orchestra_bpmn_io Adapt BPMN.io to Orchestra: preserve the diagram layout across modeler switches and restrict the editor to shapes Orchestra can model.
orchestra_eca ECA integration: start processes from events, emit events from tasks.
orchestra_api The client contract and its in-process implementation.
orchestra_server_api OAuth-gated HTTP API exposing the contract to remote consumers.
orchestra_client Drives a remote Orchestra over HTTP.
orchestra_views Expose processes, tokens, variables and tasks to Views, with readable labels, a tenant filter and ready-made dashboards.
orchestra_vbo Bulk actions on processes and tokens (cancel, delete, signal) from a dashboard, via Views Bulk Operations.
orchestra_vbo_inbox Bulk actions on the task inbox (claim, complete, reassign) via Views Bulk Operations.
orchestra_audit_trail Record process transitions into the Audit Trail chain: a durable, tamper-evident log.
orchestra_mail Email a task's audience when it is assigned and when it is reminded; notification is opted in per assignment.
orchestra_domain Resolve the active tenant from the current domain, binding each domain to a tenant.
orchestra_examples Ready-to-run example workflows.

Core concepts

Concept Stored as Role
Tenant Config entity An isolated realm; instances, tokens and variables partition per tenant.
Workflow Config entity The template: nodes, flows and the start node; shared or tenant-scoped.
Process instance Content entity One running execution of a workflow.
Token Content entity A marker on a node; the unit of execution.
Variable Content entity A named value carried by an instance.

Multi-tenancy

Instances, tokens and variables each carry a tenant field, stamped at create time from the active tenant, so a query, a listing or a purge in one tenant never reaches another's rows. The active tenant is decided by tenant resolvers: services tagged orchestra.tenant_resolver that return a tenant machine name or NULL to defer. The first non-null answer wins; with none (the single-tenant case) the default tenant is used. A workflow is either shared across every tenant (the default) or scoped to a single tenant. The orchestra_domain submodule adds a resolver that maps the current domain to a tenant.

Documentation and demo

Requirements

  • Drupal 11.3 or newer
  • PHP 8.3 or newer

Status

The engine is feature-complete against its roadmap and the test suite is green. The public API is not yet frozen and may still change before the 1.0.0 stable release. Bug reports, API feedback and documentation fixes are all welcome in the issue queue.

Supporting organizations: 
Bordeaux Metropole
Development

Project information

Releases

1.0.0-alpha5 released 26 June 2026
Works with Drupal: ^11.3
Install:

Development version: 1.x-dev updated 27 Jun 2026 at 19:45 UTC

Using Composer to manage Drupal site dependencies