Your First Temporal Workflow in Go: DI, Idempotency, and the Worker Pattern

February 22, 2026

Temporal-Go-Development, Dependency-Injection, Idempotent-Activity-Design, Temporal-Worker-Setup

Temporal, Go, Workflow, Dependency-Injection, Idempotency, Worker, Testing

Your First Temporal Workflow in Go#

This article establishes the patterns used throughout the Temporal series: dependency injection for testable activities, idempotency for safe retries, and a clean worker binary. Every subsequent article builds on these foundations.

All code lives in the companion repo at github.com/statherm/temporal-examples. For background, see Introduction to Temporal and Namespaces and Task Queues.

Project Structure#

The companion repo organizes code by domain:

temporal-examples/
  cmd/worker/main.go         # Worker binary
  cmd/starter/main.go        # Workflow starter CLI
  internal/container/
    activities.go             # Activity implementations with DI
    workflow.go               # Workflow definitions
    types.go                  # Interfaces and types
  Makefile

Workflows and Activities#

A workflow is a deterministic function that orchestrates work. It takes workflow.Context, must not perform side effects, and dispatches work through activities. Activities use standard context.Context and perform real I/O: