nedb-multi

Nedb (https://github.com/louischatriot/nedb) does not support concurrent access from multiple processes. One module which tries to solve this problem is nedb-party (https://github.com/allain/nedb-party). However, it does not support methods that return cursors. It also relies on each process starting a http server on the same port and whichever manages to start listening becomes the master and the others connect to it. This however does not work if you're using the cluster module (or PM2) as in that case the port is shared between the child processes and they are all able to become masters. I submitted a patch request, which was accepted, that instead used directory-based locking. This was enough to make it work but managing locks can be tricky.

I decided to try a similar, but lock-free approach, using the axon framework (https://github.com/tj/axon). There's still only one master process that the others connect to, but there are no locks. Also, both callback- and cursor-based methods are supported. The setAutocompactionInterval, stopAutocompaction and compactDatafile methods of the Datastore#persistence object are also supported, except for the compaction.done event fired after calling compactDatafile.

Installation

npm install --save nedb-multi

Usage

You need to start the process which actually accesses the database separately. It's located in <your-project-dir>/node_modules/nedb-multi/server.js. I suggest you use a process manager such as PM2 to do this.

You can pass the port number on which the server will listen by giving it as the first argument of the child process or by setting the env variable NEDB_MULTI_PORT.

In your other processes create the datastore by passing the port you set in the previous step. All options fields which can be serialized to JSON, are supported, except for autoload.

const Datastore = require('nedb-multi')(<port>);

const db = new Datastore({ filename: 'test.db' });

db.loadDatabase(function (err) {    
  // ...
});

Note: It does not matter if you start the server before or after creating the datastore.

Example

In /example folder you can find a project which uses nedb-multi with PM2. It will create an example.db file that contains the inserts from two processes.

Run it with: npm install, then npm start

Test

To run the tests execute: npm test.