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 database. Among those "new database" Redis, CouchDB, Riak and MongoDB (all pretty cool and awesome projects!).

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 actually write it to power Yahoo!, I wrote it as a proof of concept, and because I can.

Deal with. 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

From my PEAR channel (soon!)

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

Depending on your system, this sets up TillStore in /usr/bin/TillStore and libraries in:

• /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 :-)