gocardless/statesman

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1906 stars · 158 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Statesman is an opinionated Ruby state machine library that decouples state machine logic from models by defining machines in separate classes. It persists transitions to the database for a full audit history with JSON metadata and uses database indices to prevent duplicate transitions under race conditions.

Use cases

• model order lifecycles like pending, purchased, shipped, refunded in a Rails app
• persist a full audit trail of state transitions with metadata
• prevent duplicate state transitions across multiple app servers
• define state machines as separate classes composable with any Ruby object
• add guard conditions and callbacks around state transitions

When to choose

• you need database-level integrity and race-condition protection for state changes
• you need a persisted, queryable audit history of every transition
• you want state machine logic decoupled from your ActiveRecord models
• you're building Rails applications with complex object lifecycles

When to avoid

• you want a lightweight in-memory state machine without persistence
• you prefer state machine behavior defined directly on your models
• you're not using Ruby or Rails

Facets

library · maturity stable

developer-tools developer-tools backend web-development ruby jvm state-machine audit-trail rails transitions data-integrity

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