Worker setup overview

The worker setup runs a single thing on your machine: your worker process. The Admin UI, MongoDB, and RabbitMQ all live somewhere else — typically Orchesty Cloud, your team's shared dev instance, or a colleague's full-stack setup.

A worker is essentially a small project with the Orchesty SDK installed. Both SDKs (@orchesty/nodejs-sdk and the PHP SDK) work standalone, so the worker setup is available in either language.

When to choose this #

• You already have an Orchesty instance you can register a worker against.
• You only want to write code, not operate the platform.
• You're happy to install Node.js (20+) or PHP (8.1+) locally.

What you get #

The Node.js starter is a tiny TypeScript project:

src/
  index.ts                              # entry point: register applications, connectors, batches
.env.dist                               # template; `make` auto-generates `.env` from this
Makefile                                # canonical entry point (`make init-dev`, `make test`, ...)
AGENTS.md                               # setup workflow for AI editors
package.json                            # depends on @orchesty/nodejs-sdk
node_modules/@orchesty/nodejs-ai/rules/ # AI rules describing how to add components (see Using AI to bootstrap)

The PHP equivalent has the same shape, with composer.json instead of package.json and src/ containing PHP classes that extend the SDK abstracts.

There is no Docker, no database, no message broker — only the language runtime.

Prerequisites #

• Node.js 20+ (node --version) or PHP 8.1+ + Composer (php --version, composer --version).
• Network access to an Orchesty instance, with its base URL and an API key.
• A code editor. Cursor / Claude Code / Windsurf give you the AI bootstrap workflow; any editor works.

What's next #

1. Install the worker.
2. Connect to an instance.
3. Write your first custom node.