The XState persistence problem is five years old. Here is what we built to finally solve it.

In 2019 someone opened a GitHub issue in the XState repository. The title was "How do I persist XState actor state between server restarts?" It became one of the most-upvoted open issues in the repo. The answer from the core team was honest: XState doesn't handle persistence. Serialize the state object and store it yourself.

Five years later, that answer hasn't changed. Dozens of blog posts exist showing developers how to roll their own persistence layer. Every single one of them is a developer reinventing the same infrastructure that has nothing to do with their actual product.

We got tired of reinventing it. So we built StateKeep.

The problem with rolling your own

Persisting XState state sounds straightforward. Call actor.getSnapshot(), serialize it, store it in Redis or Postgres. On startup, rehydrate. Done.