Persistence

LangGraph’s persistence layer gives agents short-term memory through checkpointers and long-term memory through stores.

Persistence lets LangGraph applications keep useful information beyond a single graph run. It matters when an agent needs to continue a conversation, resume after an interruption, recover from a failure, or remember information across interactions.

LangGraph provides two complementary persistence systems:

• Checkpointers persist a thread’s graph state as checkpoints. Use them for short-term, thread-scoped memory, including conversation continuity, human-in-the-loop workflows, time travel, and fault tolerance.
• Stores persist application-defined data outside the graph state. Use them for long-term, cross-thread memory, including user preferences, facts, and shared knowledge.

Most applications can use both: a checkpointer tracks the current thread, and a store tracks durable information across threads.

Quickstart

Compile your graph with a checkpointer, a store, or both:

from langgraph.checkpoint.memory import InMemorySaver
from langgraph.store.memory import InMemoryStore

checkpointer = InMemorySaver()
store = InMemoryStore()

graph = builder.compile(checkpointer=checkpointer, store=store)

result = graph.invoke(
    {"messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Hi, my name is Bob."}]},
    {"configurable": {"thread_id": "thread-1"}},
)

Agent Server handles persistence automatically When using the Agent Server, you do not need to implement or configure checkpointers or stores manually. The server handles persistence infrastructure behind the scenes.

Checkpointer vs. store

	Checkpointer	Store
Persists	Graph state snapshots	Application-defined key-value data
Scope	A single thread	Across threads
Memory type	Short-term, thread-scoped memory	Long-term, cross-thread memory
Use for	Conversation continuity, human-in-the-loop, time travel, and fault tolerance	User preferences, facts, and shared knowledge
Access pattern	Pass a thread_id in graph config	Read and write items from nodes or application code
Full guide	Checkpointers	Stores

Next steps

• Use checkpointers to persist and inspect thread state.
• Use stores to persist durable data across threads.

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