orbit-connect-client

Orbit-connect is a set of 2 packages (server + client) to make it easy to get up and running with orbit-db, and hide the process of keeping various stores in sync so that you don't have to worry about it.

Warning: this is in-progress and not production ready.

The server package is intended to be run on a server. The server, in this architecture, has the role of providing both redundancy and availability. That is, it basically duplicates data from clients and makes it available for others to query. (Without the servers, peers would have to connect directly to each other. If a peer is offline, then it's database cannot be queried without servers.) The data redundancy is also useful, as client storage is not necessarily expected to be persisted over a long period of time (users change browsers/devices, clear their local storage, etc).

The client package, then exists for clients to be able to both publish their own data and discover other peers' data. Clients are not expected to communicate directly with one another in this model; rather, they use the servers as a relay.

This is the client package.

API

This package exports a class that can be used in place of orbit-db for certain operations. (Yes, it's just running orbit-db under the hood.) Specifically, all of the database open/create operations are supported. The method names and parameters correspond exactly with those in orbit-db.

These methods are asynchronous; they return a promise that only resolves once the requested database has finished syncing with all of the connected server nodes. (The resolved value is of course the orbit-db database.)

The supported methods are:

• open
• feed
• log
• eventlog
• keyvalue
• kvstore
• counter
• docs
• docstore

See the orbit-db documentation for details on these methods.

Example:

const OrbitConnect = require('@projectaspen/orbit-connect-client')

// These are the instances of orbit-connect-server to connect to.
// This value can be found in the "Swarm listening on" message that is logged when starting the server.
const nodes = [ '/ip4/127.0.0.1/tcp/4003/ws/ipfs/QmTWv5fGvUSFS8K86zxgGRYCEDLJLqGAXa5yjcZKG6weC5' ]

const orbitConnect = new OrbitConnect({
  nodes,
  orbitdbOptions: {} // this parameter is optional; this object is passed along to the orbit-db constructor

const db = await orbitConnect.open(myDbAddress)
})