Building from source

This is for anyone building TamarackDB from source: contributors and packagers. For how to run it, see Deployment. For how it works inside, see Architecture.

Build#

make build

This builds three binaries under bin/:

Each binary also has its own target with the same name, so make tamarackdb-init builds only that one.

The running build’s version comes from git describe --tags --always --dirty, evaluated at build time. It is baked into every binary at build time, not read at runtime: the Makefile sets internal/buildinfo.Version through -ldflags "-X ...".

--version prints the running build’s version and exits, without loading a config file or opening the database. Every TamarackDB binary accepts it.

Test#

make test

Demo dataset#

cmd/tamarackdb-demo fills a data directory with a large set of made-up data. Events get random types, one or two identifiers, one metadata tag, and filler text as payload. Projections get a random type, a numeric id, and longer filler text as payload. The tool writes straight to the store, not through the HTTP server, so it can seed a large database fast. Use it to try QUERY /events and GET /projections/{type}/{id} at scale.

make tamarackdb-demo
./bin/tamarackdb-demo --data-dir /path/to/data --events 1000000 --projections 100000 --seed 1

--events sets how many events to write (default 1000000). --projections sets how many projections to create (default 0). Set one of them to 0 to seed only the other. --seed makes the run repeatable.

Projection ids always run from 1 to --projections. A second run on the same data directory replaces the projections of the first one.

Other Makefile targets#

• make run: build, then start the server with config.toml from the repository root, or the built-in defaults if there’s none. The default socketPath sits in /run/tamarackdb, which usually doesn’t exist on a development machine: set socketPath, or bindAddress and port, in config.toml.
• make test-race: run the tests with Go’s race detector, as the CI does
• make fmt / make vet / make tidy: standard Go housekeeping. The CI fails a pull request whose code isn’t formatted with gofmt, so run make fmt first.
• make clean: removes bin/

Documentation site#

The documentation is a Hugo site in docs/, using the Doks theme. You need Hugo extended and Node.js 20 or later. From docs/:

npm ci
npm run dev

npm run dev serves the site at http://localhost:1313/ and reloads on every change. npm run build writes the static site to docs/public/.

The site is published to https://tamarackdb.github.io/ each time a v* tag is pushed.