OrbitDB: A peer-to-peer database for the decentralized web

Decentralized database on top of IPFS

Published in

Coinmonks

4 min readJun 23, 2018

OrbitDB is a serverless, distributed, peer-to-peer database. OrbitDB 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 OrbitDB an excellent choice for decentralized apps (dApps), blockchain applications and offline-first web applications.

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Data in OrbitDB 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

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

OrbitDB currently supports Linux and OS X, Windows is not supported yet.

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.

The minimum required version of Node.js is now 8.0.0. To use with older versions of Node.js, we provide an ES5-compatible build through the npm package, located in dist/es5/ when installed through npm.

API

See API documentation for the full documentation.

Examples

Install dependencies

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

You’ll also need babel and webpack, if you don’t have them installed already:

npm install --global babel-cli
npm install --global webpack

Some dependencies depend on native addon modules, so you’ll also need to meet node-gyp’s installation prerequisites. Therefore, Linux users may need to

make clean && make

to redo the local package-lock.json with working native dependencies.

Browser example

In macOS:

npm run build
npm run examples:browser-macos

In Linux:

npm run build
npm run examples:browser-linux

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.

Custom Store Types

You can add custom store types to OrbitDB:

// define custom store type
class CustomStore extends DocumentStore {
  constructor (ipfs, id, dbname, options) {
    super(ipfs, id, dbname, options)
    this._type = CustomStore.type
  }  static get type () {
    return 'custom'
  }
}// add custom type to orbitdb
OrbitDB.addDatabaseType(CustomStore.type, CustomStore)// instantiate custom store
let orbitdb = new OrbitDB(ipfs, dbPath)
let store = orbitdb.create(name, CustomStore.type)

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

Uses the following modules:

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/.

Attribution- This is Copy paste of OrbitDB’s github readme.

If you stumbled upon this and you are a developer so please try and let us know how you liked it and the use cases in Comment section.

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