Litestream: Revamped

Image by Annie Ruygt Litestream is an open-source tool that makes it possible to run many kinds of full-stack applications on top of SQLite by making them reliably recoverable from object storage. This is a post about the biggest change we’ve made to it since I launched it. Nearly a decade ago, I got a bug up my ass. I wanted to build full-stack applications quickly. But the conventional n-tier database design required me to do sysadmin work for each app I shipped. Even the simplest applications depended on heavy-weight database servers like Postgres or MySQL. I wanted to launch apps on SQLite, because SQLite is easy. But SQLite is embedded, not a server, which at the time implied that the data for my application lived (and died) with just one server. So in 2020, I wrote Litestream to fix that. Litestream is a tool that runs alongside a SQLite application. Without changing that running application, it takes over the WAL checkpointing process to continuously stream database updates ... Read full article.