# pinterest/pinball

Pinball is a scalable workflow manager

Repository: https://github.com/pinterest/pinball
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/pinterest-pinball
Language: JavaScript
License: Apache-2.0
License Family: permissive
Archived: true
Last push: 2019-12-10T19:01:58+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 10/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 0, release rhythm 35, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 4200, "days_push": 2458, "days_rel": null, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 0}
- flags: no_releases, archived
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 1046, forks 125 (observed 2026-08-28T04:03:21.615864+00:00)

## What it is
Pinball is a scalable workflow manager originally developed at Pinterest, providing scheduling, execution, and monitoring of job workflows via master, scheduler, worker, and UI components. It stores workflow state in MySQL and is no longer actively maintained.

## Use cases
- schedule and run recurring data pipeline jobs
- orchestrate multi-step workflows with retries and priorities
- self-host a workflow manager with a web UI
- manage job dependencies and overrun policies
- monitor scheduled job execution and get per-job email alerts

## When to choose
- you need a simple, horizontally scalable workflow scheduler backed by MySQL
- you want an admin-friendly scheduler that can be upgraded without aborting running workflows
- you're maintaining an existing Pinball deployment

## When to avoid
- you're starting a new project - it's unmaintained since Pinterest archived active development
- you need modern workflow features, active community support, or recent security patches
- you can't run MySQL as persistent storage

## Facets
- artifact type: service
- maturity: abandoned
- function: workflow-automation, scheduling, web-framework, developer-tools
- domain: self-hosted
- platform: python, self-hosted
- tags: workflow-manager, job-scheduler, data-pipelines, unmaintained, mysql-backend, automation, data-engineering, devops, linux

## Member repositories
- pinterest/pinball (main) score 10

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:03:21.615864+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T07:01:59.204708+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/pinterest/pinball (fetched 2026-08-28T04:03:21.615864+00:00, sha ea3538d4fdac)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.