About Donmai

Where the name comes from

どんまい (pronounced dohn-MY) is a Japanese baseball phrase. It is what teammates call out when a fielder drops a ball — "don't worry about it." The phrase carries no judgment; it is an acknowledgment that errors happen and the game goes on.

A workflow runtime that recovers from failures, retries steps, and keeps the pipeline moving deserves a name that says the same thing. Tasks will fail. Networks go down. APIs rate-limit. Donmai handles it — and keeps going.

Why it fits a workflow runtime

Most workflow tools treat failure as an exception. Donmai treats it as the default condition. Every step in a Donmai workflow is retryable, auditable, and recoverable by design — not as an opt-in feature.

The spirit of どんまい is baked into the runtime: when a step fails, Donmai does not stop and stare at the error. It records what happened, applies your retry policy, and moves forward.

A note from the founder

Donmai started as the execution layer inside a larger platform. We made it open source because we believe the runtime primitives — durable steps, typed workflows, plugin-native execution — should be available to every builder, not locked to one vendor.

Meet Don

Don, the kitsune is the Donmai mascot. A kitsune — the fox of Japanese folklore — is clever, adaptive, and gains wisdom with each tail it earns. Don has one tail at v0. More will follow as the project matures. Don appears at install time and on your first successful workflow run; otherwise, he stays out of the way.

Contributing and conduct

Donmai follows the Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct. All participants in the project and community spaces are expected to uphold it.