I am planning to do so and already did some research on this topic. You basically have three ways of doing so:
1. using a laptop with a midi modem and a dmx modem. This will be your best choice if you don’t mind a laptop on stage. there are lots of options for the software.
Laptop-less it becomes somewhat harder
2. use a cheap dmx controller hardware for around 100 bucks with midi in. You can then trigger scenes, which is a fixed light setup like a color. Fades and Animations are possible but very limited because you have to build them youself by making a lot of scenes and switching these via midi. But these controllers can only store like 240 scenes or so, so thats the limitation.
3. use a DMX recorder hardware which can be triggered via midi. These can record a dmx stream like a video. You can then trigger the playback of these in the same way you would trigger a sample playback in an external sampler via midi. You will still need a software to produce a dmx stream to record, but this is done at home, pre-show.
You might find this thread useful, it’s in german unfortunately, but just looking up the gear JTRebel mentions might be helpful.
https://www.musiker-board.de/threads/lichtautomatisierung-per-midi-ohne-laptop.692930/
If you are making progress with this I would be glad to read about it here!