Sparrow

Sparrow is a lightweight in-memory database built in Rust.

This repository contains the following sources:

• Sparrow core: In-memory database engine.
• Sparrow cli: Command line interface to interact with a running instance of Sparrow.
• Sparrow RESP: Sparrow implementation of the protocol RESP (REdis Serialization Protocol) that is used to interact with Sparrow.

Motivation

This is a long run personal project that I use to learn various aspects of Software Development:

• Low-level programing concepts
• Networking programing concepts
• Rust programming language
• Managing a repository
• Handling Continuous Integration & release process
• Creating good documentation

If you take a deep look at the code you might notice that I sometimes use bare-metal Rust and sometimes higher level crates. This mostly due to the learning process I follow:

1. Read documentation on a new programming concept. e.g.: How to program a TCP socket interface based on an event system and using Unix epoll?
2. Implement a working solution from scratch, which is obviously not optimized . e.g.: Use Rust low-level mio crate to implement a custom socket event polling system.
3. Refactor the previous system using an optimize and efficient crate. e.g: Use Rust hyper crate to easily create a low-level http server and abstract socket and asynchronous operations.
4. Repeat 1. and learn new stuff :D

Usage

Creating a .env file

Before building any module of Sparrow, you must know that a .env file containing the needed environment variables is required at the root of the project. A default file default.env is provided as an example configuration. You can copy it in a .env file before building.

Building binaries for your local machine

In order to build Sparrow's binaries locally you'll need to install Rust and Cargo. You can follow this instruction.

After getting a clean install on your machine, clone the repository and use Cargo to compile Sparrow:

git clone git@github.com:DonaCrio/sparrow.git
cargo build --release

You will find executable binaries under the ./target/release/ folder.

NB: Note that the release flag will compile optimize binaries. If you want to build non-optimized binaries, just remove this flag. Binaries will then be located under ./target/debug.

Building Docker images

A generic dockerfile is provided to create Docker images for every Sparrow module. To build an image you can run the following:

docker build -t <image_name> --build-arg MODULE_NAME=<module_name> .

For instance if you want to build the CLI:

docker build -t sparrow-cli --build-arg MODULE_NAME=sparrow-cli .

The built image is Docker SCRATCH image containing the optimized binary built with cargo.

Running Sparrow

You can run Sparrow modules by running the binaries or docker images. It's possible to override the configuration from the .env file by passing options. Please refer to the help display with the -h flag:

<binary_name> -h

or with docker:

docker run -it --rm <module_name> -h