Motia

🔥 The Unified Backend Framework That Eliminates Runtime Fragmentation 🔥

APIs, background jobs, queueing, streaming, states, workflows, AI agents, observability, scaling, and deployment all in one system. JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, and more in a single core primitive

💡 Motia Manifesto • 🚀 Quick Start • 📋 Defining Steps • 📚 Docs

🚀 Create your first Motia App

Get started in seconds:

npx motia@latest create

🎯 What is Motia?

Backend development today is fragmented.

APIs live in one framework, background jobs in another, queues and schedulers elsewhere, and now AI agents and streaming systems have their own runtimes. Add observability and state management on top, and you're stitching together half a dozen tools before writing your first feature.

Motia unifies all of these concerns around one core primitive: the Step.

Just as React made frontend development simple by introducing components, Motia redefines backend development with Steps - a single primitive that handles everything.

Every backend pattern, API endpoints, background jobs, queues, workflows, AI agents, streaming, observability, and state, is expressed with the same primitive.

To read more about this, check out our manifesto.

The Core Primitive: the Step

A Step is just a file with a config and a handler. Motia auto-discovers these files and connects them automatically.

Here's a simple example of two Steps working together: an API Step that emits an event, and an Event Step that processes it.

// steps/send-message.step.ts
export const config = {
  name: 'SendMessage',
  type: 'api',
  path: '/messages',
  method: 'POST',
  emits: ['message.sent']
};

export const handler = async (req, { emit }) => {
  await emit({
    topic: 'message.sent',
    data: { text: req.body.text }
  });
  return { status: 200, body: { ok: true } };
};

// steps/process-message.step.ts
export const config = {
  name: 'ProcessMessage',
  type: 'event',
  subscribes: ['message.sent']
};

export const handler = async (input, { logger }) => {
  logger.info('Processing message', input);
};

# send_message_step.py
config = {
    "name": "SendMessage",
    "type": "api",
    "path": "/messages",
    "method": "POST",
    "emits": ["message.sent"]
}

async def handler(req, context):
    await context.emit({
        "topic": "message.sent",
        "data": {"text": req.body["text"]}
    })
    return {"status": 200, "body": {"ok": True}}

# process_message_step.py
config = {
    "name": "ProcessMessage",
    "type": "event",
    "subscribes": ["message.sent"]
}

async def handler(input, context):
    context.logger.info("Processing message", input)

// steps/send-message.step.js
const config = {
  name: 'SendMessage',
  type: 'api',
  path: '/messages',
  method: 'POST',
  emits: ['message.sent']
};

const handler = async (req, { emit }) => {
  await emit({
    topic: 'message.sent',
    data: { text: req.body.text }
  });
  return { status: 200, body: { ok: true } };
};

module.exports = { config, handler };

// steps/process-message.step.js
const config = {
  name: 'ProcessMessage',
  type: 'event',
  subscribes: ['message.sent']
};

const handler = async (input, { logger }) => {
  logger.info('Processing message', input);
};

module.exports = { config, handler };

👉 With just two files, you've built an API endpoint, a queue, and a worker. No extra frameworks required.

Learn more about Steps →

💻 Remix your own Motia App in Replit

🚀 Quickstart

Get Motia project up and running in under 60 seconds:

1. Bootstrap a New Motia Project

npx motia@latest create   # runs the interactive terminal

Follow the prompts to pick a template, project name, and language.

2. Start the Workbench

Inside your new project folder, launch the dev server:

npx motia dev # ➜ http://localhost:3000

That's it! You have:

• ✅ REST APIs with validation
• ✅ Visual debugger & tracing
• ✅ Multi-language support
• ✅ Event-driven architecture
• ✅ Zero configuration
• ✅ AI development guides included (Cursor, OpenCode, Codex, and more)

📖 Full tutorial in our docs →

🤖 AI-Assisted Development

Every Motia project includes detailed AI development guides that work with any AI coding tool:

• Cursor IDE - Optimized .mdc rules with context-aware suggestions
• OpenCode, Codex (OpenAI) - Full support via AGENTS.md standard
• Aider, Jules, Factory, Amp, GitHub Copilot - Compatible with AGENTS.md format (used by 20k+ projects)

The guides include patterns for API endpoints, background tasks, state management, real-time streaming, and complete architecture blueprints.

🤖 Learn more about AI development support →

🎯 Triggers

📖 Learn more about Steps →

🔌 Plugins & Adapters

Extend Motia with plugins and customize infrastructure with adapters.

Official Plugins

Pre-installed with every Motia project to enhance your workbench:

Plugin	Description	NPM
@motiadev/plugin-logs	Real-time log viewer with filtering and search
@motiadev/plugin-endpoint	Interactive API endpoint testing tool
@motiadev/plugin-observability	Performance tracing and distributed monitoring
@motiadev/plugin-states	State management and inspection tool
@motiadev/plugin-bullmq	BullMQ queue and DLQ management

View all community plugins →

Official Adapters

Customize your infrastructure with production-ready adapters:

Adapter	Purpose	NPM
@motiadev/adapter-bullmq-events	BullMQ-based event processing
@motiadev/adapter-rabbitmq-events	RabbitMQ event adapter
@motiadev/adapter-redis-cron	Redis-based cron scheduling
@motiadev/adapter-redis-state	Redis state management
@motiadev/adapter-redis-streams	Redis Streams for real-time data

Create Your Own

• Create a Plugin - Build custom workbench features
• Plugin Development Guide - Complete documentation
• Contribute to awesome-plugins - Share with the community

🎯 Examples

🏆 ChessArena.ai - Full-Featured Production App

A complete chess platform benchmarking LLM performance with real-time evaluation.

Live Website → | Source Code →

Built from scratch to production deployment, featuring:

• 🔐 Authentication & user management
• 🤖 Multi-agent LLM evaluation (OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, Grok)
• 🐍 Python engine integration (Stockfish chess evaluation)
• 📊 Real-time streaming with live move updates and scoring
• 🎨 Modern React UI with interactive chess boards
• 🔄 Event-driven workflows connecting TypeScript APIs to Python processors
• 📈 Live leaderboards with move-by-move quality scoring
• 🚀 Production deployment on Motia Cloud

📚 More Examples

View all 20+ examples →

Features demonstrated: Multi-language workflows • Real-time streaming • AI integration • Production deployment

🌐 Language Support

📚 Resources

• 📖 Documentation - Complete guides and API reference
• 💬 Discord - Community support and discussions
• 🐛 GitHub Issues - Bug reports and feature requests
• 🗺️ Roadmap - Upcoming features and progress

🚧 Roadmap

We have a public roadmap for Motia, you can view it here.

Feel free to add comments to the issues, or create a new issue if you have a feature request.

🤝 Contributing

We welcome contributions! Check our Contributing Guide to get started.