Upgrade a legacy Docker deployment to support Retool Workflows

Learn how to add support for Retool Workflows to an existing self-hosted deployment.

Retool Workflows was available as an optional configuration prior to self-hosted Retool 3.33. It is part of the standard configuration of Stable and Edge releases.

If you deployed a Legacy release and did not enable Retool Workflows, you can upgrade to a Stable or Edge release and configure it with support.

Requirements

Your self-hosted deployment must meet the following requirements for Retool Workflows.

VM configuration

Retool Workflows requires a Linux-based virtual machine that meets the following system requirements:

• Ubuntu 22.04 or later.
• 16GiB memory.
• 8x vCPUs.
• 60GiB storage.
• curl and unzip software packages installed.

Retool recommends you allocate more resources than the minimum requirements so that your instance can more easily scale.

Retool version

Workflows is available in all Stable and Edge releases of self-hosted Retool, and in Legacy releases 3.20.15 or later. If you are using an older version, upgrade to either a Stable or Edge release. Unless you need to make use of the latest changes and have the ability to regularly upgrade your deployment, Retool recommends you use Stable releases.

Temporal

Temporal is a distributed system used to schedule and run asynchronous tasks for Retool Workflows. A Self-hosted Retool instance uses a Temporal cluster to facilitate the execution of each workflow amongst a pool of self-hosted workers that make queries and execute code in your VPC. Temporal manages the queueing, scheduling, and orchestration of workflows to guarantee that each workflow block executes in the correct order of the control flow. It does not store any block results by default.

You can use a Retool-managed cluster on Temporal Cloud, which is recommended for most use cases. You can also use an existing self-managed cluster that is hosted on Temporal Cloud or in your own infrastructure. Alternatively, you can spin up a new self-hosted cluster alongside your Self-hosted Retool instance.

Retool-managed cluster

Recommended

You should use a Retool-managed cluster if:

• Your organization is on the Enterprise plan.
• You don't have an existing cluster which you prefer to use.
• Your cluster only needs to be used for a Self-hosted Retool deployment.
• You don't want to manage the cluster directly.
• You have a single or multi-instance Retool deployment, where each instance requires its own namespace.

Retool admins can enable Retool-managed Temporal. To get started, navigate to the Retool Workflows page and click Enroll now. Once you update your configuration, return to the page and click Complete setup.

It can take a few minutes to initialize a namespace in Retool-managed Temporal.

Retool-managed Temporal clusters are hosted on Temporal Cloud. Your Self-hosted Retool deployment communicates with the cluster when building, deploying, and executing Retool Workflows. All orchestration data to Temporal is fully encrypted and uses the private encryption key set for your deployment.

Self-managed cluster

If you want to create a new, self-hosted cluster on Temporal Cloud, sign up first. Once your account is provisioned, you can then deploy Self-hosted Retool.

Temporal Cloud supports 10+ AWS regions from which to select, 99.99% availability, and 99.99% guarantee against service errors.

You should use an existing self-managed cluster, hosted on Temporal Cloud or in your own infrastructure, if:

• You cannot use a Retool-managed cluster.
• Your organization is on the Free, Team, or Business plan.
• You have an existing cluster and would prefer to use another namespace within it.
• You need a cluster for uses other than a Self-hosted Retool deployment.
• You want to manage the cluster directly.
• You have a multi-instance Retool deployment, where each instance would have its own namespace in a shared Self-hosted Temporal cluster.

Self-managed cluster considerations

Retool recommends using a separate datastore for the Workflows Queue in production. Consider using AWS Aurora Serverless V2 configured to an ACU (cpu) provision ranging from 0.5 to 8 ACU. 1 ACU can provide around 10 QPS. The Workflows Queue is write-heavy (around 100:1 write to read operations) and Aurora Serverless can scale to accommodate spikes in traffic without any extra configuration.

Environments

For test environments, Retool recommends using the same database for the Retool Database and Workflows Queue. Without any extra configuration, Retool Workflows can process approximately 5-10 QPS (roughly, 5-10 concurrent blocks executed per second).

Workflows at scale

You can scale Self-hosted Retool Workflow-related services to perform a high rate of concurrent blocks per second. If your deployment needs to process more than 10 workflows per second, you can use:

• A Retool-managed cluster.
• A self-managed cluster on Temporal Cloud.
• Apache Cassandra as the Temporal datastore.

If you anticipate running workflows at a higher scale, please reach out to us to work through a deployment strategy that is best for your use case.

Local cluster

You should spin up a new cluster alongside your Self-hosted Retool instance if:

• You cannot use a Retool-managed cluster.
• Your organization is on the Free, Team, or Business plan.
• You don't have an existing cluster to use.
• You don't need a cluster for uses other than a Self-hosted Retool deployment.
• You want to test a Self-hosted Retool deployment with a local cluster first.
• You have a multi-instance Retool deployment, but each instance is in its own VPC and requires its own Self-hosted Temporal cluster.

Local cluster considerations

Retool recommends using a separate datastore for the Workflows Queue in production. Consider using AWS Aurora Serverless V2 configured to an ACU (cpu) provision ranging from 0.5 to 8 ACU. 1 ACU can provide around 10 QPS. The Workflows Queue is write-heavy (around 100:1 write to read operations) and Aurora Serverless can scale to accommodate spikes in traffic without any extra configuration.

Environments

For test environments, Retool recommends using the same database for the Retool Database and Workflows Queue. Without any extra configuration, Retool Workflows can process approximately 5-10 QPS (roughly, 5-10 concurrent blocks executed per second).

Workflows at scale

You can scale Self-hosted Retool Workflow-related services to perform a high rate of concurrent blocks per second. If your deployment needs to process more than 10 workflows per second, you can use:

• A Retool-managed cluster.
• A self-managed cluster on Temporal Cloud.
• Apache Cassandra as the Temporal datastore.

If you anticipate running workflows at a higher scale, please reach out to us to work through a deployment strategy that is best for your use case.

Once you’ve decided which Temporal deployment option is best for you, you'll need to modify and provision additional services to your existing deployment and provide sufficient resources to run those resources. Retool recommends providing the following resource specifications wherever you deploy your infrastructure (e.g. at the VM level if using docker compose or "node" level if using Kubernetes):

System architecture changes

Support for Retool Workflows requires provisioning additional containers and services:

Container	Image	Repository	Services
workflows-worker	backend	tryretool/backend	WORKFLOW_TEMPORAL_WORKER
workflows-backend	backend	tryretool/backend	WORKFLOW_BACKEND DB_CONNECTOR DB_SSH_CONNECTOR
code-executor	code-executor-service	tryretool/code-executor-service	No service type.

The following diagrams illustrates how your deployment instance's architecture changes after you add support for Retool Workflows.

Current architecture

New architecture

* Only present if you are using the default PostgreSQL database for Retool Database.

1. Upgrade Retool

Follow these instructions to update your Retool instance to a newer release version.

Retool strongly recommends that you back up the VM before performing an update. If you cannot complete a full backup, you should at least:

• Create a snapshot of your PostgreSQL database.
• Copy the environment variables in docker.env to a secure location outside of Retool.

To update your deployment to a newer version of Self-hosted Retool:

1. Update the Dockerfile and CodeExecutor.Dockerfile with the newer version number. For example:
   • tryretool/backend:3.114.3-stable
   • tryretool/code-executor-service:3.114.3-stable
2. Run ./update_retool.sh to perform the update.

The Retool instance is temporarily stopped while the update takes place and restarts automatically. Retool recommends performing the upgrade during off-peak hours to minimize downtime for users.

2. Configure Temporal

Retool-managed cluster

Compare your current docker-compose.yml file with the latest docker-compose.yml. You need to ensure you see the new services and appropriate network changes for the workflows-worker, code-executor, and workflows-backend containers.

Allow your deployment to connect to Temporal

Open up egress to the public internet on ports 443 and 7233 to allow outbound-only connections to Temporal Cloud from your deployment. This is so services can enqueue work to, and poll work out, of Temporal.

Temporal Cloud does not have a static IP range to allow list. If more specificity is required, egress is required on ports on the following domains:

Port	Domains
443	*.retool.com, *.tryretool.com, *.temporal.io
7233	*.tmprl.cloud

Self-hosted cluster

Compare your current docker-compose.yml file with the latest docker-compose.yml. You need to ensure you see the new services and appropriate network changes for workflows-worker, code-executor, and workflows-backend.

In addition to the variables already set, update the following depending on your Temporal deployment:

Temporal Cloud

Allow your deployment to connect to Temporal

Open up egress to the public internet on ports 443 and 7233 to allow outbound-only connections to Temporal Cloud from your deployment. This is so services can enqueue work to, and poll work out, of Temporal.

Temporal Cloud does not have a static IP range to allow list. If more specificity is required, egress is required on ports on the following domains:

Port	Domains
443	*.retool.com, *.tryretool.com, *.temporal.io
7233	*.tmprl.cloud

Configure environment variables for Temporal cluster

Set the following environment variables for the MAIN_BACKEND, WORKFLOW_BACKEND, and WORKFLOW_TEMPORAL_WORKER services in the configuration file.

Temporal Cloud requires security certificates for secure access.

Variable	Description
WORKFLOW_TEMPORAL_CLUSTER_NAMESPACE	The namespace in your Temporal cluster for each Retool deployment you have (e.g., retool-prod). Default is workflows.
WORKFLOW_TEMPORAL_CLUSTER_FRONTEND_HOST	The frontend host of the cluster.
WORKFLOW_TEMPORAL_CLUSTER_FRONTEND_PORT	The port with which to connect. Default is 7233.
WORKFLOW_TEMPORAL_TLS_ENABLED	Whether to enable mTLS. Set to true.
WORKFLOW_TEMPORAL_TLS_CRT	The base64-encoded mTLS certificate.
WORKFLOW_TEMPORAL_TLS_KEY	The base64-encoded mTLS key.

Self-hosted

If you use a PostgreSQL database as a persistence store, the PostgreSQL user must have permissions to CREATE DATABASE. If this is not possible, you can manually create the required databases in your PostgreSQL cluster: temporal and temporal_visibility.

Configure environment variables for Temporal cluster

Set the following environment variables for MAIN_BACKEND and WORKFLOW_TEMPORAL_WORKER services, if not already configured.

Variable	Description
WORKFLOW_TEMPORAL_CLUSTER_NAMESPACE	The namespace in your Temporal cluster for each Retool deployment you have (e.g., retool-prod). Default is workflows.
WORKFLOW_TEMPORAL_CLUSTER_FRONTEND_HOST	The frontend host of the Temporal cluster.
WORKFLOW_TEMPORAL_CLUSTER_FRONTEND_PORT	The port with which to connect to the Temporal cluster. Defaults to 7233.
WORKFLOW_TEMPORAL_TLS_ENABLED	(Optional) Whether to enable mTLS.
WORKFLOW_TEMPORAL_TLS_CRT	(Optional) The base64-encoded mTLS certificate.
WORKFLOW_TEMPORAL_TLS_KEY	(Optional) The base64-encoded mTLS key.

Local cluster

Compare your current docker-compose.yml file with the latest docker-compose-workflows-with-temporal.yml. You need to ensure you see the new services and appropriate network changes for workflows-worker, code-executor, and workflows-backend.

These changes include temporal, temporal-admin-tools, temporal-ui for provisioning a Temporal cluster alongside your deployment. If you haven't already, Retool recommends that you externalize your database using a separate data store for Temporal in production.

Retool recommends using a separate datastore for the Workflows Queue in production. Consider using AWS Aurora Serverless V2 configured to an ACU (cpu) provision ranging from 0.5 to 8 ACU. 1 ACU can provide around 10 QPS. The Workflows Queue is write-heavy (around 100:1 write to read operations) and Aurora Serverless can scale to accommodate spikes in traffic without any extra configuration.

Environments

For test environments, Retool recommends using the same database for the Retool Database and Workflows Queue. Without any extra configuration, Retool Workflows can process approximately 5-10 QPS (roughly, 5-10 concurrent blocks executed per second).

Workflows at scale

You can scale Self-hosted Retool Workflow-related services to perform a high rate of concurrent blocks per second. If your deployment needs to process more than 10 workflows per second, you can use:

• A Retool-managed cluster.
• A self-managed cluster on Temporal Cloud.
• Apache Cassandra as the Temporal datastore.

If you anticipate running workflows at a higher scale, please reach out to us to work through a deployment strategy that is best for your use case.

The following changes also include some additional environment variables set on the api container, such as:

  WORKFLOW_BACKEND_HOST=http://workflows-backend:3000
  CODE_EXECUTOR_INGRESS_DOMAIN=http://code-executor:3004