Playing With SurrealDB

2/11/2023

Getting Started

I’ve know about SurrealDB for a few months now, and while its still in beta, I’m using to play around and develop a side project. getting started was real easy, their guide is really easy to follow, but I did run into some minor issues.

Using Docker

I didn’t want to install Surreal in my laptop, since I won’t be using it much, so I decided to go with their docker image.

Following the guide was easy, but I couldn’t make the HTTP request work, as it turns out, their guide does not tell you how to set the username / password for starting the docker image. docker run --rm -p 8000:8000 surrealdb/surrealdb:latest start --user root --pass root

With this command, following the guide to make HTTP requests should work.

Using it with docker-compose

Using it with docker was easy, and I whent through their guide fairly quickly, getting to know all the commands. Being the developer that I am, I got the idea of connecting it to my Nuxt 3 Project, so I got to work on making a docker-compose.yaml file.

version: '3.8'

services:

  surrealdb:
    image: surrealdb/surrealdb:latest
    container_name: surrealdb
    ports:
      - "8000:8000"
    stdin_open: true
    tty: true
    command: 
      - start
      - --user=root
      - --pass=root
    restart: always

This worked, but reading the Documention, I stumble upon the CLI tool for backup, and wanted to give that a try, but seems like the SurrealDB image does not have bash installed, and I could not connect to it.

Github Issues to the rescue.

Seeing as I could not connect to the image, I started searching on their github-issues forum, to see if anyone has asked the question earlier. lo and behold for issue #1385

Following the comment from LeopoldBriand, for explaining how to copy the ssh from one image to the surrealdb image, and his docker-compose file, this made my life easier. And thanks to bakman2 for explaining how to expose the database file.

Dockerfile

FROM busybox:1.35.0-uclibc as busybox

FROM surrealdb/surrealdb:latest
COPY --from=busybox /bin/sh /bin/sh
COPY --from=busybox /bin/mkdir /bin/mkdir
COPY --from=busybox /bin/cat /bin/cat
COPY --from=busybox /bin/chmod /bin/chmod
ENTRYPOINT /surreal start --log debug --user $DB_USER --pass $DB_PASSWORD file://database.db

docker-compose.yaml

version: '3'

services:
  db:
    env_file:
      - ./.env
    build:
      args:
        - DB_USER=${DB_USER}
        - DB_PASSWORD=${DB_PASSWORD}
      context: ./
      dockerfile: Dockerfile
    image: db
    ports:
      - 8000:8000
    volumes:
      - ./data/database.db:/database.db

.env file

DB_USER=root
DB_PASSWORD=root

With these 3 files, I was able to run surrealdb, and connect to the image:
docker ps
docker exec -it <DOCKER IMAGE ID> /bin/sh

For running the back up command:

/surreal export --conn http://localhost:8000 --user root --pass root --ns test --db test export.sql
The command must start with ‘/surreal’ as described in the Dockerfile.

Now that I have the surrealDB running on docker-compose, I should have no trouble connecting it with my Nuxt 3 project right …?
thats is a post for another day.