An update issued against a paused workflow is rejected immediately. Unpausing lets updates be admitted and executed again.

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/updates/worker.py

Start the workflow in a second terminal:

uv run workflow_pause/updates/starter.py

Send an update while running — it returns the new total:

temporal workflow update execute -w pause-updates-wf --name add --input 5

Pause it:

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

Send an update while paused — it is rejected immediately:

temporal workflow update execute -w pause-updates-wf --name add --input 5
# Error: unable to update workflow: Workflow is paused. Cannot update the workflow.

Unpause it and updates work again. Finish the workflow with the finish update:

temporal workflow unpause -w pause-updates-wf
temporal workflow update execute -w pause-updates-wf --name add --input 3
temporal workflow update execute -w pause-updates-wf --name finish