orbit-db is a serverless, distributed, peer-to-peer database. orbit-db uses IPFS as its data storage and IPFS Pubsub to automatically sync databases with peers. It's an eventually consistent database that uses CRDTs for conflict-free database merges making orbit-db an excellent choice for decentralized apps (dApps), blockchain applications and offline-first web applications.

Data in orbit-db can be stored in a

Key-Value Store
Log Database (append-only log)
Feed (same as log database but entries can be removed)
Document Store (store indexed JSON documents)
Counters

This is the Javascript implementation and it works both in Node.js and Browsers.

To get started, try the OrbitDB CLI, read the Getting Started Guide or check Live demo 1, Live demo 2 or P2P TodoMVC app!

Usage
API
Examples
Development
Background
Contributing
License

Usage

Read the GETTING STARTED guide for a more in-depth tutorial and to understand how OrbitDB works.

CLI

For the CLI tool to manage orbit-db database, see OrbitDB CLI.

It can be installed from Npm with:

npm install orbit-db-cli -g

As a library

Install dependencies:

npm install orbit-db ipfs

Use it as a module:

const IPFS = require('ipfs')
const OrbitDB = require('orbit-db')

// OrbitDB uses Pubsub which is an experimental feature
// and need to be turned on manually.
// Note that these options need to be passed to IPFS in 
// all examples even if not specfied so.
const ipfsOptions = {
  EXPERIMENTAL: {
    pubsub: true
  },
}

// Create IPFS instance
const ipfs = new IPFS(ipfsOptions)

ipfs.on('error', (e) => console.error(e))
ipfs.on('ready', async () => {
  // Create a database
  const orbitdb = new OrbitDB(ipfs)
  const db = await orbitdb.log('database name')
  // Add an entry to the database
  const hash = await db.add('hello world')
  // Get last 5 entries
  const latest = db.iterator({ limit: 5 }).collect()
  console.log(JSON.stringify(latest, null, 2))
})

For more details, see examples for kvstore, eventlog, feed, docstore and counter.

API

See API documentation for the full documentation.

Getting Started
OrbitDB
- keyvalue
- log
- feed
- docstore
- counter
- common

Examples

Install dependencies

git clone https://github.com/orbitdb/orbit-db.git
cd orbit-db
npm install

Browser example

npm run build
npm run examples:browser

Check the code in examples/browser/browser.html and try the live example.

Node.js example

npm run examples:node

Eventlog

See the code in examples/eventlog.js and run it with:

node examples/eventlog.js

More examples at examples.

Development

Run Tests

npm test

Build

npm run build

Benchmark

node benchmarks/benchmark-add.js

See benchmarks/ for more benchmarks.

Logging

To enable OrbitDB's logging output, set a global ENV variable called LOG to debug,warn or error:

LOG=debug node <file>

Background

OrbitDB uses an append-only log as its operations log, implemented in ipfs-log.

To understand a little bit about the architecture, check out a visualization of the data flow at https://github.com/haadcode/proto2 or a live demo: http://celebdil.benet.ai:8080/ipfs/Qmezm7g8mBpWyuPk6D84CNcfLKJwU6mpXuEN5GJZNkX3XK/.

TODO:

list of modules used
orbit-db-pubsub
crdts

Contributing

We would be happy to accept PRs! If you want to work on something, it'd be good to talk beforehand to make sure nobody else is working on it. You can reach us on IRC #orbitdb on Freenode, or in the comments of the issues section.

A good place to start are the issues labelled "help wanted" or the project's status board.

README.md

orbit-db

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