A blazingly fast, open-source application server with type-safe APIs, built-in JS/ES6/TS Runtime, Auth, and Admin UI built on Rust, SQLite & V8.

Simplify with fewer moving parts: an easy to self-host, single-file, extensible backend for your mobile, web or desktop application. Sub-millisecond latencies eliminate the need for dedicated caches, no more stale or inconsistent data.

TrailBase

Try the demo online - Email: admin@localhost, password: secret.

For more context, documentation, and a live demo, check out the website: trailbase.io. Questions? Thoughts? - Take a look at the FAQ or reach out. If you like TrailBase or want to follow along, consider leaving a ⭐🙏.

Project Structure & Releases

This repository contains all components that make up TrailBase including client libraries, tests, documentation and examples. Only the benchmarks are kept separately due to their external dependencies.

Pre-built static binaries are available as GitHub releases for Linux an MacOS.

Moreover, containers and client packages are available via:

Running

You can run pre-built TrailBase either by downloading the latest release and running

$ ./trail run

or using docker:

$ mkdir traildepot
$ alias trail="docker run -p 4000:4000 --mount type=bind,source=$PWD/traildepot,target=/app/traildepot trailbase/trailbase /app/trail"
$ trail run

. Run trail --help to get a full list of commands. If you don't want to rely on pre-built binaries, TrailBase is easy to build yourself, see below.

Building

If you have all the necessary dependencies (rust, nodejs, pnpm, ...) installed, you can build TrailBase simply by running:

$ git submodule update --init --recursive
$ cargo build --release

To build fully static binaries on Linux (et al):

$ RUSTFLAGS="-C target-feature=+crt-static" cargo build --target x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu --release

Alternatively, if you want a container or don't have to deal with dependencies, you can build using docker:

$ git submodule update --init --recursive
$ docker build . -t trailbase

Contributing

Contributions are very much appreciated 🙏. For anything beyond bug fixes, let's quickly chat to see how a proposal fits into the overall roadmap and avoid any surprises.

We're not sure yet what the best setup or exact license is for compatibility between OSL-3.0 and more popular licenses or use as a framework. So we'd ask you to sign a simple CLA that retains your copyright, ensures that TrailBase will continue to forever be freely available under an OSI-approved copyleft license, while allowing for some flexibility and sub-licensing as established by much larger, successful projects such as Grafana or Element.

License

TrailBase is free software under the terms of the OSL-3.0.

We chose this license over more popular, similar copyleft licenses such as AGPLv3 due to its narrower definition of derivative work that only covers modifications to TrailBase itself. This is similar to GPL's classpath exception or LGPL's linkage exception allowing the use of TrailBase as a framework without inflicting licensing requirements on original work layered on top. That said, we ain't lawyers. The author of the license provides a more thorough explanation. If you have any concerns or advice for us, please reach out.