VoltAgent/voltagent-best-practices

VoltAgent Best Practices

Quick reference for VoltAgent conventions and patterns.

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Choosing Agent or Workflow

| Use | When | | --- | --- | | Agent | Open-ended tasks that require tool selection and adaptive reasoning | | Workflow | Multi-step pipelines with explicit control flow and suspend/resume |

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Layout

src/
|-- index.ts
|-- agents/
|-- tools/
`-- workflows/

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Quick Snippets

Basic Agent

import { Agent } from "@voltagent/core";

const agent = new Agent({
  name: "assistant",
  instructions: "You are helpful.",
  model: "openai/gpt-4o-mini",
});

Model format is provider/model (for example openai/gpt-4o-mini or anthropic/claude-3-5-sonnet).

Basic Workflow

import { createWorkflowChain } from "@voltagent/core";
import { z } from "zod";

const workflow = createWorkflowChain({
  id: "example",
  input: z.object({ text: z.string() }),
  result: z.object({ summary: z.string() }),
}).andThen({
  id: "summarize",
  execute: async ({ data }) => ({ summary: data.text }),
});

VoltAgent Bootstrap

import { VoltAgent } from "@voltagent/core";
import { honoServer } from "@voltagent/server-hono";

new VoltAgent({
  agents: { agent },
  workflows: { workflow },
  server: honoServer(),
});

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Memory Defaults

• Use memory for a shared default across agents and workflows.
• Use agentMemory or workflowMemory when defaults need to differ.

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Server Options

• Use @voltagent/server-hono for Node HTTP servers.
• Use @voltagent/server-elysia as an alternative Node server provider.
• Use serverless provider for fetch runtimes (Cloudflare, Netlify).

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Observability Notes

• Use VoltOpsClient or createVoltAgentObservability for tracing.
• VoltAgent will auto-configure VoltOps if VOLTAGENT_PUBLIC_KEY and VOLTAGENT_SECRET_KEY are set.

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Recipes

Short best-practice recipes live in the embedded docs:

• packages/core/docs/recipes/
• Search: rg -n "keyword" packages/core/docs/recipes -g"*.md"
• Read: cat packages/core/docs/recipes/<file>.md

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Footguns

• Do not use JSON.stringify inside VoltAgent packages. Use safeStringify from @voltagent/internal.

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Resources

• https://voltagent.dev/docs
• https://github.com/voltagent/voltagent
• https://github.com/voltagent/voltagent/tree/main/examples