Demonstrates how pause interacts with activities. The workflow runs a single long-running activity (process-item) that heartbeats for ~5 seconds and is configured to fail its first two attempts before succeeding, so you can observe both kinds of pause.

Workflow Pause is experimental. The dev server must be started with the pause flag enabled — see the workflow_pause README for prerequisites. First see the main README.md for general prerequisites.

Run the worker in one terminal:

uv run workflow_pause/activities/worker.py

Start the workflow in a second terminal:

uv run workflow_pause/activities/starter.py

While the worker log shows the activity processing (attempt 1), pause the workflow:

temporal workflow pause -w pause-activities-wf --reason demo

The currently running activity attempt is not killed — it runs to its conclusion — but because the workflow is paused, the next workflow task is not dispatched, so the workflow does not advance. Unpause to let it continue:

temporal workflow unpause -w pause-activities-wf

The activity fails its first two attempts, so it enters a retry backoff. Pause the activity so its retries stop:

temporal activity pause --activity-id process-item -w pause-activities-wf

The activity will not be retried while paused. Resume retries with:

temporal activity unpause --activity-id process-item -w pause-activities-wf

On the third attempt the activity succeeds and the workflow completes with processed widget.