A peer-to-peer database for the decentralized web

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

Data in OrbitDB can be stored in a

• (append-only log)
• (same as log database but entries can be removed)
• (store indexed JSON documents)

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

To get started, try the , read the or check , or !

Table of Contents

Usage

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

CLI

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

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 instanceconst 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 , , , and .

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 for the full documentation.

Examples

Install dependencies

git clone https://github.com/orbitdb/orbit-db.gitcd orbit-dbnpm install

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

npm install --global babel-clinpm install --global webpack

Browser example

npm run buildnpm run examples:browser

Check the code in and try the .

Node.js example

npm run examples:node

Eventlog

See the code in and run it with:

node examples/eventlog.js

More examples at .

Custom Store Types

You can add custom store types to OrbitDB:

// define custom store typeclass 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 orbitdbOrbitDB.addDatabaseType(CustomStore.type, CustomStore)// instantiate custom storelet 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 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 
    

Background

Uses the following modules:

To understand a little bit about the architecture, check out a visualization of the data flow at or a live demo: .

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 on Freenode, or in the comments of the .

A good place to start are the issues labelled or the project's .

Sponsors

The development of OrbitDB has been sponsored by:

If you want to sponsor developers to work on OrbitDB, please reach out to @haadcode.