RethinkDB

What is RethinkDB?

• Open-source database for building realtime web applications
• NoSQL database that stores schemaless JSON documents
• Distributed database that is easy to scale
• High availability database with automatic failover and robust fault tolerance

RethinkDB is an open-source scalable database built for realtime applications. It exposes a new database access model -- instead of polling for changes, the developer can tell the database to continuously push updated query results to applications in realtime. RethinkDB allows developers to build scalable realtime apps in a fraction of the time with less effort.

Quick start

1. Install the server

To install RethinkDB on your machine (only the amd64 / x86_64 architecture is currently supported), run the following:

Ubuntu Trusty, Xenial, Bionic and Debian Jessie, Stretch versions

$ source /etc/lsb-release && echo "deb https://dl.bintray.com/rethinkdb/apt $DISTRIB_CODENAME main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/rethinkdb.list

$ wget -qO- https://dl.bintray.com/rethinkdb/keys/pubkey.gpg | sudo apt-key add -

$ sudo apt-get update

$ sudo apt-get install rethinkdb

Centos 7

sudo wget https://dl.bintray.com/rethinkdb/rpm/centos/7/x86_64/rethinkdb.repo \
    -O /etc/yum.repos.d/rethinkdb.repo
sudo yum install rethinkdb 

2. Start the server

Run the following command from your terminal:

$ rethinkdb
...
Listening for intracluster connections on port 29015
Listening for client driver connections on port 28015
Listening for administrative HTTP connections on port 8080
Listening on cluster addresses: 127.0.0.1, ::1
Listening on driver addresses: 127.0.0.1, ::1
Listening on http addresses: 127.0.0.1, ::1
...
Server ready ...

Point your browser to localhost:8080. You’ll see an administrative UI where you can control the cluster (which so far consists of one server), and play with the query language.

3. Run some queries

Click on the Data Explorer tab in the browser. You can manipulate data using JavaScript straight from your browser. By default, RethinkDB creates a database named test. Let’s create a table:

r.db('test').tableCreate('tv_shows')

Use the “Run” button or Shift+Enter to run the query. Now, let’s insert some JSON documents into the table:

r.table('tv_shows').insert([{ name: 'Star Trek TNG', episodes: 178 },
                            { name: 'Battlestar Galactica', episodes: 75 }])

We’ve just inserted two rows into the tv_shows table. Let’s verify the number of rows inserted:

r.table('tv_shows').count()

Finally, let’s do a slightly more sophisticated query. Let’s find all shows with more than 100 episodes.

r.table('tv_shows').filter(r.row('episodes').gt(100))

As a result, we of course get the best science fiction show in existence.

Next steps

Congratulations on your progress! Now check out the documentation of any of our drivers below to dive deeper.

• Elixir - rethinkdb-elixir
• Go - rethinkdb-go
• Haskell - rethinkdb-haskell
• Java - rethinkdb-java
• JavaScript - rethinkdb-js
• Lua - rethinkdb-lua
• PHP - rethinkdb-php
• Python - rethinkdb-python
• Ruby - rethinkdb-ruby
• Rust - rethinkdb-rs
• TypeScript - rethinkdb-ts

More detailed and updated documentation is coming soon!

Building

First install some dependencies. For example, on Ubuntu or Debian:

sudo apt-get install build-essential protobuf-compiler python \
    libprotobuf-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libboost-all-dev \
    libncurses5-dev libjemalloc-dev libssl-dev wget m4 g++

Generally, you will need

• GCC or Clang
• Protocol Buffers
• jemalloc
• Ncurses
• Boost
• Python 2
• libcurl
• libcrypto (OpenSSL)
• libssl-dev

Then, to build:

./configure --allow-fetch
# or run ./configure --allow-fetch CXX=clang++

make -j4
# or run make -j4 DEBUG=1

sudo make install
# or run ./build/debug_clang/rethinkdb

Need help?

Find us at Spectrum and on Twitter. You can also report an issue.

Contributing

RethinkDB is currently being developed by a growing and passionate community. We could use your help too! Check out our contributing guidelines to get started.

Where's the changelog?

We keep a list of changes and feature explanations here.

Donors

• The development of data compression and RethinkDB's new art is sponsored by AIDAX:
  

• Our test infrastructure is sponsored by DigitalOcean: