Camunda 8 - Develop Workers (TypeScript SDK) - Lab

Lab project for the Camunda 8 - Develop Workers (TypeScript SDK) course on Camunda Academy.

This course gives a detailed hands-on experience in developing workers with the Camunda TypeScript SDK. During the course, you review core and advanced job worker behavior, including timeout handling, variable fetching, and job completion patterns.

Difficulty: Intermediate | Time: ~1h 30min | Platform: Camunda 8.9+

What you will learn

• Describe how job workers implement business logic in Camunda 8
• Understand how a Camunda job worker activates, completes, and fails jobs
• Recognize and configure important worker settings such as timeout and parallelism
• Implement worker logic that returns output variables on job completion
• Run a TypeScript worker application against a deployed BPMN process

Overview

The Order Process (orderProcess) is a BPMN process with three service tasks executed by TypeScript job workers:

Job Type	Worker Location	Description
trackOrderStatus	index.ts + TrackingOrderService.ts	Tracks the order status and simulates a 10-second delay
packItems	index.ts + TrackingOrderService.ts	Handles item packaging
processPayment	index.ts + TrackingOrderService.ts	Processes payment and returns a confirmation value

When the application starts, it creates one randomized process instance and registers three workers to handle the service tasks in order.bpmn.

Prerequisites

Knowledge

• Awareness of Camunda and job workers
• Competent with BPMN
• Competent with Node.js and TypeScript basics

Recommended preparatory courses:

• Camunda - Technical Overview
• Camunda - Develop your first job worker (Java)
• Camunda - Error Handling

Tools & Access

• Node.js 20+
• npm 10+
• TypeScript 6.x
• An IDE such as VS Code
• A Camunda 8 SaaS account with a running cluster and client credentials

Configuration

This project uses createCamundaClient() from @camunda8/orchestration-cluster-api, which reads configuration from environment variables.

For Camunda 8 SaaS, set these variables before running the lab:

Variable	Description
CAMUNDA_REST_ADDRESS	Base REST address of the orchestration cluster
CAMUNDA_AUTH_STRATEGY	Authentication mode, typically OAUTH
CAMUNDA_CLIENT_ID	OAuth client ID
CAMUNDA_CLIENT_SECRET	OAuth client secret
CAMUNDA_OAUTH_URL	OAuth token endpoint, typically https://login.cloud.camunda.io/oauth/token
CAMUNDA_TOKEN_AUDIENCE	Token audience, typically zeebe.camunda.io
CAMUNDA_DEFAULT_TENANT_ID	Optional tenant override

Example:

export CAMUNDA_REST_ADDRESS="https://<your-cluster-url>"
export CAMUNDA_AUTH_STRATEGY="OAUTH"
export CAMUNDA_CLIENT_ID="<your-client-id>"
export CAMUNDA_CLIENT_SECRET="<your-client-secret>"
export CAMUNDA_OAUTH_URL="https://login.cloud.camunda.io/oauth/token"
export CAMUNDA_TOKEN_AUDIENCE="zeebe.camunda.io"

If you downloaded credentials from Camunda Console, you may see older ZEEBE_* names in the generated file. This project uses the newer CAMUNDA_* names expected by the Orchestration Cluster API client.

Install

npm install

Build

npx tsc

This compiles the TypeScript sources to JavaScript files in the project root because no separate output directory is configured in tsconfig.json.

Run

node index.js

Before running: deploy order.bpmn to your cluster using Camunda Modeler or Web Modeler.

The application will:

1. Create one process instance with randomized order variables.
2. Start three job workers for trackOrderStatus, packItems, and processPayment.
3. Complete each job using the logic in TrackingOrderService.ts.

Project Structure

.
├── index.ts               # Entry point: creates client, workers, and a process instance
├── TrackingOrderService.ts # Business logic invoked by all workers
├── order.bpmn             # BPMN process definition
├── package.json           # Project metadata and dependencies
├── tsconfig.json          # TypeScript compiler configuration
└── README.md              # Lab documentation

Dependencies

Library	Version	Purpose
@camunda8/orchestration-cluster-api	^9.1.0	Camunda 8 Orchestration Cluster API client
@faker-js/faker	^10.4.0	Random test data generation for order variables
typescript	^6.0.3	TypeScript compiler