Looks like the code is here: <a href="https://github.com/benbjohnson/litestream/tree/v0.5">https://github.com/benbjohnson/litestream/tree/v0.5</a><p>Really nice to see this, I wrote this comment almost 2 years ago when I was a little miffed about trying to use litestream and litefs: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37614193">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37614193</a><p>I think this solves most of the issues? You can now freely run litestream on your DB and not worry about issues with multiple writers? I wonder how the handoff is handled.<p>The read replica FUSE layer sounds like a real nice thing to have.<p>edit: Ah, it works like this: <a href="https://github.com/benbjohnson/litestream/pull/617">https://github.com/benbjohnson/litestream/pull/617</a><p>> When another Litestream process starts up and sees an existing lease, it will continually retry the lease acquisition every second until it succeeds. This low retry interval allows for rolling restarts to come online quickly.<p>Sounds workable!
ben, thanks for litestream!<p>we're using it on production for a write-heavy interal use-case (~12GB compressed) for more than a year now; and it's costing us a couple hundred pennies per month (azure).<p>excited to try the new changes when they land.
I wish Fly would polish the developer experience on top of SQLite. They're close, but it's missing:<p>1. A built-in UI and CLI that manages SQLite from a volume. Getting the initial database on a Fly Machine requires more work than it should.<p>2. `fly console` doesn't work with SQLite because it spins up a separate machine, which isn't connected to the same volume where the SQLite data resides. Instead you have to know to run `fly ssh console —pty`, which effectively SSH's into the machine with the database.<p>The problem in general with SQLite web apps is they tend to be small apps, so you need a <i>lot</i> of them to make a decent amount of money hosting them.
What a coincidence, I was just researching Litestream today! I use Sqlite on my VPS and was thinking about adding this.<p>Am I understanding correctly that I will be able to restore a database to any point-in-time that is while the litestream process is running? Because auto-checkpointing could consume the WAL while it isn't running?<p>So for an extreme example if the process crashed for an hour between 2:00 and 3:00, I could restore to 1:55 or 3:05 but the information required to restore between 2:00 and 3:00 is lost?
This looks great! A few years ago I wrote a sqlite vfs for using dynamodb as a backing store[0] called DonutDB. With the recent addition of CAS to S3, I was thinking about making a new version of DonutDB backed by S3. I'm really glad lightstream supports this so I don't have to!<p>I can't wait to try this out.<p>[0]: <a href="https://github.com/psanford/donutdb">https://github.com/psanford/donutdb</a>
<p><pre><code> We have a sneaking suspicion that the robots that write LLM code are going to like SQLite too. We think what coding agents like Phoenix.new want is a way to try out code on live data, screw it up, and then rollback both the code and the state.
</code></pre>
Prescient.<p>Agents would of course work well if they can go back in time to checkpoints and branch from there, exploring solutions parallely as needed.<p>Anyone who has experience with building workflows (Amazon SWF, Temporal, and the like) knows how difficult it is to maintain determinism in face of retries & re-drives in multi-tier setups (especially, those involving databases).<p>Replit recently announced their Agent's integration with Neon's <i>time travel</i> feature [0] for exactly the purpose outlined in TFA. Unlike Fly.io though, Replit is built on GCP and other 3p providers like Neon and it is unclear if both GCP & Databricks won't go all Oracle on them.<p>[0] <a href="https://blog.replit.com/safe-vibe-coding" rel="nofollow">https://blog.replit.com/safe-vibe-coding</a>
If you wanted to use litestream to replicate many databases (ideally, one or more per user), which is one of the use cases described here (and elsewhere), how do you tell litestream to add new databases dynamically? The configuration file is static and I haven't found an API to tell it to track a new db at runtime.
I have been following Ben for a long time but I never knew LiteFS was based on his work. I somehow settled eventually for rqlite for self managed distributed.<p><a href="https://github.com/rqlite/rqlite">https://github.com/rqlite/rqlite</a>
> Now that we’ve switched to LTX, this isn’t a problem any more. It should thus be possible to replicate /data/*.db, even if there’s hundreds or thousands of databases in that directory.<p>That was the show stopper. Now multi tenant with per tenant database whee (in theory) each user can roll back to certain point in time or at least completely download their database and take away for whatever they want to do with it is going to be possible.
Very cool! This is so clever and makes deploying it so simple. I just wasn't able to use it yet because we'd have (many) thousands of SQLite DBs to backup. I quickly hacked something together using fanotify + SQLite's Backup API to have some copies at least, but I'm going to try to switch to Litestream if this amount of files would be supported by the wildcard replication.
What will be required from users of the existing Litestream version to upgrade to the new one? Is it a matter of bumping the version when it comes out or is there more to it?
If I’m deploying a new version of my app, the typical managed solution will spawn a new server instance with that new version, and once a health check has succeeded a couple of times it will reroute trafic to this new instance and kill the old one.<p>Previously this would be problematic, as the new instance might miss changes made by the old server. Is this fixed by these new changes?
Awesome stuff, this resolves my #1 feature request of being able to replicate an entire directory of SQLite *.db's from a single Litestream process - happy it's finally here.<p>Should make replicating Multi tenant per-user SQLite databases a lot more appealing.
Is Litestream on a path to subsume LiteFS's capabilities? Re: PITR, would this be used to facilitate automated A/B testing of AI-generated code changes against live data subsets? I can imagine a lot of cool stuff in that direction. This is really cool Ben!
This is exciting! Especially glad that Litestream is still maintained. Is there a use-case for Litestream for more than backup? I am a fan of offline-first but it would be cool to have a way to synchronize on-device SQLite instances to a single central instance.
Very cool!<p>There may be a typo here:<p>> <i>The most straightforward way around this problem is to make sure only one instance of Litestream can</i> replication <i>to a given destination.</i><p>Can replicate? Or can do replications?
Is there a migration guide from stable to the branch 0.5? I’m running Litestream as a Docker sidecar alongside my Python app container and it’s been great and a nice comfort knowing my SQLite db is backed up to S3.
Fantastic to see it's getting updated! I am a big fan of litestream, have been using it for a while together with pocketbase. It's like a cheat code for a cheap, reliable and safe backend.
> It will be able to fetch and cache pages directly from S3-compatible object storage.<p>Does this mean your SQLite database size is no longer restricted by your local disk capacity?
Litestream has seen very little development lately and I was worried it was dead. Very glad to see Ben Johnson is continuing to push the project forward with some exciting new plans.
asking since ben does take a look here...<p>will revamped litestream have a solution for ACKing only when transactions have durably committed to storage?
tangent: in modern SQLite, are writes still serialized? That's my main concern when choosing a tech stack for an app that might have thousands of writes happening on peak periods
Very cool idea, I wonder if that works better than their Postgres instances<p>Recently, I deployed a little side project using a small postgres vm on fly.io
After a couple of days, and only having about 500kb of data stored in that db, the postgres vm went into an unrecoverable fail loop, saying it ran out of memory, restarting, then immediately running out of memory again, so on and so forth<p>It took about 3-4hrs to recover the data jumping through a lot of hoops to be able to access the data, copy it to another volume and finally download it<p>I would've reached for support, but it seems like the only option available is just posting on their forum. I saw a couple of related posts, all with unsatisfactory answers unfortunately<p>To be fair, it was incredibly easy to get up and running with them. On the other hand, almost all the time I saved by that quick start, was wasted recovering the failing db, all the while my site was down<p>Ironically, I originally developed the project using sqlite, but then switched to postgres to deploy
Just a heads-up, the link in the "Litestream is fully open source" callout is malformed and leads to:<p><a href="https://http//litestream.io/" rel="nofollow">https://http//litestream.io/</a>
For something rather new there seems to be too many choices already. Please pick a strategy under one name, good defaults, and a couple of config options.