Trigger.dev makes it easy to write and run long-running tasks. You write and test tasks locally in your project, and then deploy them to Trigger.dev where they reliably invoke the tasks. Trigger.dev handles the infrastructure, observability, and execution.

Often, you want to trigger a task when a record in your database is created, updated, or deleted. For instance, you might want to use a Trigger.dev task to generate an embedding for each new post in your database:

In this guide, you’ll learn how to use Sequin to trigger Trigger.dev tasks from database changes.

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Prerequisites

You are about to create a regular Trigger.dev task that you will execute when ever a post is inserted or updated in your database. Sequin will detect all the changes on the posts table and then send the payload of the post to an API endpoint that will call tasks.trigger() to create the embedding and update the database.

As long as you create an HTTP endpoint that Sequin can deliver webhooks to, you can use any web framework or edge function (e.g. Supabase Edge Functions, Vercel Functions, Cloudflare Workers, etc.) to invoke your Trigger.dev task. In this guide, we’ll show you how to setup Trigger.dev tasks using Next.js API Routes.

You’ll need the following to follow this guide:

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Create a Trigger.dev task

Start by creating a new Trigger.dev task that takes in a Sequin webhook sink payload, creates an embedding, and then inserts the embedding into the database:

1

Create a `create-embedding-for-post` task

In your src/trigger/tasks directory, create a new file called create-embedding-for-post.ts and add the following code:

This task takes in a Sequin record, creates an embedding, and then uppserts the embedding into a post_embeddings table.

2

Add the task to your Trigger.dev project

Register the create-embedding-for-post task to your Trigger.dev cloud project by running the following command:

npx trigger.dev@latest dev

In the Trigger.dev dashboard, you should now see the create-embedding-for-post task:

You’ve successfully created a Trigger.dev task that will create an embedding for each post in your database. In the next step, you’ll create an API endpoint that Sequin can deliver records to.

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Setup API route

You’ll now create an API endpoint that will receive webhook sink payloads from Sequin and then trigger the create-embedding-for-post task.

This guide covers how to setup an API endpoint using the Next.js App Router. You can find examples for Next.js Server Actions and Pages Router in the Trigger.dev documentation.

1

Create a route handler

Add a route handler by creating a new route.ts file in a /app/api/create-embedding-for-post directory:

app/api/create-embedding-for-post/route.ts
import type { createEmbeddingForPost } from "@/trigger/create-embedding-for-post";
import { tasks } from "@trigger.dev/sdk/v3";
import { NextResponse } from "next/server";

export async function POST(req: Request) {
  const authHeader = req.headers.get('authorization');
  if (!authHeader || authHeader !== `Bearer ${process.env.SEQUIN_WEBHOOK_SECRET}`) {
    return NextResponse.json({ error: 'Unauthorized' }, { status: 401 });
  }
  const payload = await req.json();
  const handle = await tasks.trigger<typeof createEmbeddingForPost>(
    "create-embedding-for-post",
    payload
  );

  return NextResponse.json(handle);
}

This route handler will receive records from Sequin, parse them, and then trigger the create-embedding-for-post task.

2

Set secret keys

You’ll need to set four secret keys in a .env.local file:

SEQUIN_WEBHOOK_SECRET=your-secret-key
TRIGGER_SECRET_KEY=secret-from-trigger-dev
OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-proj-asdfasdfasdf
DATABASE_URL=postgresql://

The SEQUIN_WEBHOOK_SECRET ensures that only Sequin can access your APIendpoint.

The TRIGGER_SECRET_KEY is used to authenticate requests to Trigger.dev and can be found in the API keys tab of the Trigger.dev dashboard.

The OPENAI_API_KEY and DATABASE_URL are used to create an embedding using OpenAI and connect to your database. Be sure to add these as environment variables in Trigger.dev as well.

You’ve successfully created an API endpoint that can receive record payloads from Sequin and trigger a Trigger.dev task. In the next step, you’ll setup Sequin to trigger the endpoint.

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Create a webhook sink

Create a webhook sink that captures changes to your database and sends a HTTP POST request to your local API endpoint:

1

Create a new sink

Navigate to the “Sinks” tab, click the “Create Sink” button, and select “Webhook Sink”.

2

Select source table

Select the table you want to capture changes from (i.e public.posts).

3

Choose message type

Specify whether you want to receive changes or rows from the table.

In this example, you should choose “Rows” since you want to ensure every post gets an embedding and that embeddings are updated as posts change.

4

Configure backfill

You can optionally indicate if you want your webhook endpoint to receive a backfill of all or a portion of the table’s existing data. Since you want to process all posts, select to backfill all data.

5

Configure message grouping

Under “Message grouping”, leave the default option selected to ensure events for the same row are sent to your webhook endpoint in order.

6

Configure delivery settings

Under “Delivery configuration”, choose a conservative value for “Request timeout” and set “Batch size” to 1 since we’re just processing one post at a time.

7

Configure HTTP endpoint

First, create a tunnel to your local endpoint:

  1. In the Sequin console, open the “HTTP Endpoint” tab and click the “Create HTTP Endpoint” button
  2. Enter a name for your endpoint (i.e. local_endpoint) and flip the “Use localhost” switch
  3. Follow the instructions to install the Sequin CLI, then run:
sequin tunnel --ports=3001:local_endpoint
  1. Click “Add encryption header” and set the key to Authorization and the value to Bearer SEQUIN_WEBHOOK_SECRET
  2. Click “Create HTTP Endpoint”

Then, under “HTTP Endpoint”, select your local_endpoint and add the path to your API route (i.e. /api/create-embedding-for-post).

8

Name and create sink

Give your sink a name (i.e. posts_webhook_sink) and click “Create Webhook Sink”.

Your webhook sink is now created and ready to send events to your API endpoint.

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Test end-to-end

1

Spin up you dev environment

  1. The Next.js app is running: npm run dev
  2. The Trigger.dev dev server is running npx trigger.dev@latest dev
  3. The Sequin tunnel is running: sequin tunnel --ports=3001:local_endpoint
2

Create a new post in your database

insert into
posts (title, body, author)
values
  (
    'The Future of AI',
    'An insightful look into how artificial intelligence is shaping the future of technology and society.',
    'Alice H Johnson'
  );
3

Trace the change in the Sequin dashboard

In the Sequin console, navigate to the Trace tab and confirm that Sequin delivered the event to your local endpoint:

4

Confirm the event was received by your endpoint

In your local terminal, you should see a 200 response in your Next.js app:

POST /api/create-embedding-for-post 200 in 262ms
5

Observe the task run in the Trigger.dev dashboard

Finally, in the Trigger.dev dashboard, navigate to the Runs tab and confirm that the task run completed successfully:

Every time a post is created or updated, Sequin will deliver the row payload to your API endpoint and Trigger.dev will run the create-embedding-for-post task.

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Next steps

With Sequin and Trigger.dev, every post in your database will now have an embedding. This is a simple example of how you can trigger long-running tasks on database changes.

From here, add error handling and deploy to production:

  • Add retries to your Trigger.dev task to ensure that any errors are captured and logged.
  • Deploy to production and update your Sequin consumer to point to your production database and endpoint.

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