pod: A Rust repository from Memri

About

Pod is the open-source backend for Memri project.

It's written in Rust and provides an HTTP interface for use by the clients.

See documentation on:

How to run Pod (this document)
Pod HTTP API
Writing Plugins
Running Plugins
Security
What is a Shared Server
How are data types defined in Schema
Schema synchronization between clients/plugins and the Pod

Build & Run

There are 3 main ways to run Pod: using pre-built docker images to just run it, building it in docker, and building it locally/natively.

In all of the approaches, you will also need docker version 20.10.0 (2020-12-08) if you want to run Plugins in containers.

Run pre-built docker image of Pod

This is the fastest way to get Pod running on your system, however it only works for Pod versions that have already been built on our server.
To run branch "dev" on commit "de929382":

POD_VERSION="dev-de929382" docker-compose --file examples/using-prebuilt-docker.yml up

Run in docker

This is the least involved way to build locally. To build&run Pod inside docker:

docker-compose up --build

Local build/run

This is the fastest way to compile Pod from source, for example, if you're making any changes in Pod and want to test it.
It will also work on any OS and CPU architecture.

You will need Rust >= 1.45 and sqlcipher:

On MacOS: brew install rust sqlcipher
On ArchLinux: pacman -S --needed rust sqlcipher base-devel
On Ubuntu and Debian:

apt-get install sqlcipher libsqlcipher-dev build-essential
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

After this, you can run Pod with:

./examples/run_development.sh

Pod development

If you develop Pod, you might want to have faster build turn-around.

Use this to incrementally compile the project (after installing cargo-watch):

cargo watch --ignore docs -s 'cargo check'

You can read about various components of the server:

Memri project: blog.memri.io
SQLite: sqlite.org
Sqlcipher: zetetic.net/sqlcipher
Rusqlite database driver: github.com/rusqlite/rusqlite
Warp HTTP engine: github.com/seanmonstar/warp
Rust language: rust-lang.org

Database

Pod uses SQLite database as its storage mechanism.

When running Pod, a file named data/db/*.db3 will be created. You can use the following command to browse the database locally:

sqlcipher -cmd "PRAGMA key = \"x'yourDatabaseKey'\";" data/db/your_database_file

For example, .schema will display the current database schema.

If you want to fill the database with some example data, execute res/example_data.sql inside the database.