gun-level

LevelDB is awesome. It's awesomer with gun.

This driver let's you use level as your persistence layer for gun.

usage

To begin, npm install gun-level and change require('gun') to require('gun-level'). Boom, you're done! The rest is optional tweaking to meet your needs. By default, all your gun instances will persist to a folder named level/ in the same directory as your code. Let's take a look at the ways you can customize gun-level:

• blaze
• path
• share
• up
• down
• db

Passing those options into the Gun constructor will modify the behavior of your gun instance.

var options = {
    blaze: true,
    share: true,
    path: 'localhost',
    up: require('module-up'),
    down: require('module-down'),
    db: customInterface
}
new Gun({ level: options })

blaze: String/Boolean

When working with the file system, you can "blaze" a path to your resource. If the path doesn't already exist, it will be built recursively. For example, if we wanted to drop our data into a file at db/chat/messages.json, we could say blaze: 'db/chat/messages.json' and if any part of the path doesn't exist, it will be built.

path: String

If you're not pointing to the file system or want to avoid blazing a path (such is the case with a URL), you can use path. Unless you switch blaze on, no files or folders will be created.

share: Boolean

Some implementations (I'm looking at you, levelDown) can't have more than one instance pointing to the same database. By setting the share option, you can reuse any instance already open at that path.

Note: you can only share a database if both (or more) parties have opted into sharing.

up: Function

Setting this option allows you to exchange the level interface for another. This is useful when you're running gun-level in the browser through a build step like webpack or browserify, and want a level interface that was designed for the browser.

Note: I am actively working to help gun become friendlier to build steps. Right now it's a tad sketchy.

down: Function

This is the most powerful option - it lets you exchange the driver for any API compatible levelDown module. To see why this is amazingly super cool, check out this list of modules.

Exchanging the backend is remarkably simple:

new Gun({
    level: {
        path: 'data.json',
        down: require('jsondown')
    }
})

Boom, now your persistence layer is a json file named data.json. Give it a shot! You can find jsondown here.

Now, as fun as json is, it's not terribly impressive. Mongo would be impressive. Here's the code you'd need to write to save into mongo:

// start your mongo server

new Gun({
    level: {
        path: 'localhost',
        down: require('mongodown')
    }
})

Whaaaaaaat? Yeah. It's that cool. If you need more configuration, instead of passing the require, we can pass an object:

new Gun({
    level: {
        path: 'localhost',
        down: {
            db: require('redisdown'),
            host: 'localhost',
            port: 6379
        }
    }
})

This is the configuration object passed to levelup (with defaults under the hood). If you want to override any of level's native settings, that's how it's done.

db: Object

Skip the middleman entirely. If you're already using a level interface, you can pass it directly to your gun instance.

var levelUP = require('levelup')
var level = levelUP('path')

new Gun({
    level: {
        db: level
    }
})

If you simply want to share an existing level instance with gun, that's how it's done.

finishing words

If you're not yet familiar with gun, you can learn more about it on their wiki page.

That pretty much covers it! If you have any questions or issues, post an issue or submit a pull request. Thanks for checking out gun-level!