TillStore -- Because key-value-stores are awesome!

Enough said. ;-) Well, maybe not.

The History

I went to [nosqlberlin][] on Thursday, October 22nd, 2009. It was a pretty cool event and the talks were people presenting their new database. Among those new databases Redis, CouchDB, Riak and MongoDB (all pretty cool and awesome projects!).

Redis and Riak are what people call key-value-stores. Not exactly a database, but a more or less dumb store for small sets of data. Think memcached -- those two are right down that alley. Which brings me to TillStore!

Previously, I had joked with a friend about my own key-value-store -- TillStore, but I had actually never ever implemented it.

When I got home from nosqlberlin on Thursday night, I realized I had lost the keys to my apartment. So even though they were found and one of my (most awesome) neighbours had deposited them at the bakery downstairs, I wish shit out of luck. The backery was closed at 10 PM.

So instead of freezing my butt off outside, I went to the next Internet cafe (across the street from where I live), did some work, and started hacking on TillStore. So not even 10 work hours later, this is the initial 0.1.0-alpha release (BE GENTLE).

People may say, "WTF?!". Yeah, correct. I wrote a key-value-store in PHP. But I did not write it to power Yahoo!, I wrote it as a proof of concept, and because I can.

Deal with it. And enjoy! :-)

Installation

You'll need a PEAR installation on your system.

Ubuntu

apt-get install php-pear

FreeBSD

cd /usr/ports/devel/php-pear && make install clean

Install TillStore

From Github:

git clone git://github.com/till/TillStore.git
cd TillStore
pear install -f package.xml

Or:

pear install -f http://cloud.github.com/downloads/till/TillStore/TillStore-0.1.0.tgz

From my PEAR channel (soon!)

pear channel-discover pear.lagged.de
pear install lagged/TillStore

What does it install?

The location depends on your system, and PEAR configuration.

Libraries

• /usr/share/php/TillStore.php
• /usr/share/php/TillStore/Exception.php
• /usr/share/php/TillStore/Server.php

Executable

• /usr/bin/TillStore

Configuration

• /usr/share/php/data/TillStore/etc/default.ini

(Try pear list-files lagged/TillStore to verify.)

Usage

By default TillStore starts on localhost:31337. You may override these settings in a local.ini.

• Start TillStore: /usr/bin/TillStore

• Curl examples:

  • Command: curl -X GET http://localhost:31337/foo

  • Response: Not found.

  • Command: curl -X POST -d bar http://localhost:31337/foo

  • Response: OK

  • Command: curl -X GET http://localhost:31337/foo

  • Response: bar

(In a series, of course.)

• Shutdown the server (special administrator feature):

  telnet localhost 31337

  SHUTDOWN

What ...

... TillStore is.

• fun
• unit-tested (the TillStore, not TillStore_Server)

... TillStore is not.

• persistent
• fully HTTP-compatible
• production-ready :-)