Quick start

Get up and running quickly with rqlite

The quickest way to get running is to download a pre-built release binary, available on the GitHub releases page. Once installed, you can start a single rqlite node like so:

  1. $ rqlited -node-id 1 node1

Once launched rqlite will be listening on http://localhost:4001.

Inserting records

Let’s insert some records using the rqlite shell, using standard SQLite commands.

  1. $ rqlite
  2. 127.0.0.1:4001> CREATE TABLE foo (id INTEGER NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY, name TEXT)
  3. 0 row affected (0.000668 sec)
  4. 127.0.0.1:4001> .schema
  5. +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
  6. | sql                                                                         |
  7. +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
  8. | CREATE TABLE foo (id INTEGER NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY, name TEXT)               |
  9. +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
  10. 127.0.0.1:4001> INSERT INTO foo(name) VALUES("fiona")
  11. 1 row affected (0.000080 sec)
  12. 127.0.0.1:4001> SELECT * FROM foo
  13. +----+-------+
  14. | id | name  |
  15. +----+-------+
  16. | 1  | fiona |
  17. +----+-------+

Forming a cluster

While not strictly necessary to run rqlite, running multiple nodes means you’ll have a fault-tolerant cluster. Start two more nodes, allowing the cluster to tolerate failure of a single node, like so:

  1. $ rqlited -node-id 2 -http-addr localhost:4003 -raft-addr localhost:4004 -join http://localhost:4001 node2
  2. $ rqlited -node-id 3 -http-addr localhost:4005 -raft-addr localhost:4006 -join http://localhost:4001 node3

This demonstration shows all 3 nodes running on the same host. In reality you probably wouldn’t do this, and then you wouldn’t need to select different -http-addr and -raft-addr ports for each rqlite node. Consult the Clustering Guide for more details.

With just these few steps you’ve now got a fault-tolerant, distributed relational database. Running on each rqlite node will be a fully-replicated copy of the SQLite database. Any data you insert will be replicated across the cluster, in a durable and fault-tolerant manner.

Next steps

Take a look at the Developer Guide, and check out the detailed guides for clustering and Kubernetes.

Last modified January 19, 2023: Update _index.md (5aae208)