Dolt is Git for Data!
Dolt is a SQL database that you can fork, clone, branch, merge, push and pull just like a Git repository. Connect to Dolt just like any MySQL database to run queries or update the data using SQL commands. Use the command line interface to import CSV files, commit your changes, push them to a remote, or merge your teammate's changes.
All the commands you know for Git work exactly the same for Dolt. Git versions files, Dolt versions tables. It's like Git and MySQL had a baby.
We also built DoltHub, a place to share Dolt databases. We host public data for free. If you want to host your own version of DoltHub, we have DoltLab. If you want us to run a Dolt server for you, we have Hosted Dolt.
Join us on Discord to say hi and ask questions, or check out our roadmap to see what we're building next.
What's it for?
Lots of things! Dolt is a generally useful tool with countless applications. But if you want some ideas, here's how people are using it so far.
Dolt CLI
The dolt CLI has the same commands as git, with some extras.
$ dolt
Valid commands for dolt are
init - Create an empty Dolt data repository.
status - Show the working tree status.
add - Add table changes to the list of staged table changes.
diff - Diff a table.
reset - Remove table changes from the list of staged table changes.
clean - Remove untracked tables from working set.
commit - Record changes to the repository.
sql - Run a SQL query against tables in repository.
sql-server - Start a MySQL-compatible server.
sql-client - Starts a built-in MySQL client.
log - Show commit logs.
branch - Create, list, edit, delete branches.
checkout - Checkout a branch or overwrite a table from HEAD.
merge - Merge a branch.
conflicts - Commands for viewing and resolving merge conflicts.
cherry-pick - Apply the changes introduced by an existing commit.
revert - Undo the changes introduced in a commit.
clone - Clone from a remote data repository.
fetch - Update the database from a remote data repository.
pull - Fetch from a dolt remote data repository and merge.
push - Push to a dolt remote.
config - Dolt configuration.
remote - Manage set of tracked repositories.
backup - Manage a set of server backups.
login - Login to a dolt remote host.
creds - Commands for managing credentials.
ls - List tables in the working set.
schema - Commands for showing and importing table schemas.
table - Commands for copying, renaming, deleting, and exporting tables.
tag - Create, list, delete tags.
blame - Show what revision and author last modified each row of a table.
constraints - Commands for handling constraints.
migrate - Executes a database migration to use the latest Dolt data format.
read-tables - Fetch table(s) at a specific commit into a new dolt repo
gc - Cleans up unreferenced data from the repository.
filter-branch - Edits the commit history using the provided query.
merge-base - Find the common ancestor of two commits.
version - Displays the current Dolt cli version.
dump - Export all tables in the working set into a file.
Learn more about Dolt use cases, configuration and guides to use dolt on our documentation page.
How to use this image
This image is for Dolt SQL Server, which is similar to MySQL Docker Image. Running this image without any arguments
is equivalent to running dolt sql-server --host 0.0.0.0 --port 3306 command locally. The reason for persisted host
and port is that it allows user to connect to the server inside the container from the local host system through
port-mapping.
To check out supported options for dolt sql-server, you can run the image with --help flag.
$ docker run dolthub/dolt-sql-server:latest --help
Connect to the server in the container from the host system
To be able to connect to the server running in the container, we need to set up a port to connect to locally that
maps to the port in the container. The host is set to 0.0.0.0 for accepting connections to any available network
interface.
$ docker run -p 3307:3306 dolthub/dolt-sql-server:latest
Now, you have a running server in the container, and we can connect to it by specifying our host, 3307 for the port, and root for the user, since that's the default user and we didn't provide any configuration when running the server.
For example, you can run mysql client to connect to the server like this:
$ mysql --host 0.0.0.0 -P 3307 -u root
Define configuration for the server
You can either define server configuration as commandline arguments, or you can use yaml configuration file. For the commandline argument definition you can simply define arguments after whole docker command.
$ docker run -p 3307:3306 dolthub/dolt-sql-server:latest -l debug --no-auto-commit
Or, we can mount a local directory to specific directories in the container.
The special directory for server configuration is /etc/dolt/servercfg.d/. You can only have one .yaml configuration
file in this directory. If there are multiple, the default configuration will be used. If the location of
configuration file was /Users/jennifer/docker/server/config.yaml, this is how to use -v flag which mounts
/Users/jennifer/docker/server/ local directory to /etc/dolt/servercfg.d/ directory in the container.
$ docker run -p 3307:3306 -v /Users/jennifer/docker/server/:/etc/dolt/servercfg.d/ dolthub/dolt-sql-server:latest
The Dolt configuration and data directories can be configured similarly:
-
The dolt configuration directory is
/etc/dolt/doltcfg.d/There should be one.jsondolt configuration file. It will replace the global dolt configuration file in the container. -
We set the location of where data to be stored to default location at
/var/lib/dolt/in the container. The data directory does not need to be defined in server configuration for container, but to store the data on the host system, it can also be mounted to this default location.
$ docker run -p 3307:3306 -v /Users/jennifer/docker/databases/:/var/lib/dolt/ dolthub/dolt-sql-server:latest