xs (cross-stream)

"You don't so much run it, as poke at it."

An event stream store for personal, local-first use. Kinda like the sqlite3 cli, but specializing in the event sourcing use case.

Usage

Usage: xs <COMMAND>

Commands:
  serve   Provides an API to interact with a local store
  cat     `cat` the event stream
  append  Append an event to the stream
  cas     Retrieve content from Content-Addressable Storage
  remove  Remove an item from the stream
  help    Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)

Unlike sqlite, which operates directly on the file system, xs requires a running process to manage access to the local store. This enables features like subscribing to real-time updates from the event stream.

% xs serve ./store
11:27:54.464 9zalp xs.start

Basics

Note: xs is designed to be orchestrated with Nushell, but since many are more familiar with bash, here are the very basics that work just fine from bash.

To append items to the stream, use:

% xs append ./store <topic>

The content for the event can be provided via stdin and, if present, will be stored in Content-Addressable Storage (CAS). You can also append events without content. Additionally, you can attach arbitrary metadata to an event using the --meta flag, which accepts metadata in JSON format.

For example:

% echo "content" | xs append ./store my-topic --meta '{"type": "text/plain"}'
{"topic":"my-topic","id":"03clswrgmmkkoqnotna38ldvl","hash":"sha256-Q0copBCnj1b8G1iZw1k0NuYasMcx6QctleltspAgXlM=","meta":{"type":"text/plain"},"ttl":"forever"}

To fetch the contents of the stream, use the cat command:

% xs cat ./store/
{"topic":"xs.start","id":"03clswlaih9x17izyzqy5jg7n","hash":null,"meta":{"expose":null},"ttl":null}
{"topic":"my-topic","id":"03clswrgmmkkoqnotna38ldvl","hash":"sha256-Q0copBCnj1b8G1iZw1k0NuYasMcx6QctleltspAgXlM=","meta":{"type":"text/plain"},"ttl":"forever"}

xs generates a few meta events, such as xs.start, which is emitted whenever the process managing the store starts.

You can also see the my-topic event we just appended, along with a hash, which represents the hash of the stored content. You can retrieve this content from the Content-Addressable Storage (CAS) using:

% xs cas ./store/ sha256-Q0copBCnj1b8G1iZw1k0NuYasMcx6QctleltspAgXlM=
content

Built with 🙏💚

• fjall: for indexing and metadata
• cacache: for content (CAS)
• hyper: provides an HTTP/1.1 API over a local Unix domain socket for subscriptions, etc.
• Nushell: for scripting and interop