qbase — kdb+/q Core Libraries & Framework

qbase is a batteries-included foundation for building kdb+/q applications: a boot sequence, a dependency loader (require), structured logging, command-line argument parsing, and a broad set of utility libraries (HTTP, IPC, CSV, cron, timezones, compression and more).

Requirements

• kdb+ >= 4.0 (verified on 4.1)

Install

curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/belowzeroff/qbase/master/install.sh | bash

Installs to ~/.qbase (override with $QBASE_HOME), or clone the repository and use it in place. See install.sh for options (offline install via QBASE_SRC, $QINIT integration).

Quick Start

Start kdb+ with boot.q:

• Linux / macOS: q ~/.qbase/boot.q (or q $(pwd)/boot.q from a checkout)
• Windows: q %CD%\boot.q

This loads the cargs, log and ns core libraries automatically during boot. Additional libraries can be loaded via the --load-libs command-line argument, or at runtime with .require.lib.

Example Output

> rlwrap $QHOME/l64/q $(pwd)/boot.q
...
Application root: /home/me/git/qbase | qbase root: /home/me/git/qbase
Library root location refreshed [ File Count: 36 ]
...
Logging enabled [ Level: INFO ] [ Logger: .log.loggers.basic ] [ Formatter: .log.formatter.default ]

2026.07.20 08:58:26.877 INFO  pid-727 me 0 Initialised library: log
q)

Libraries

Core

Module	Description
require	Dependency-aware code loader
log / log.loggers	Structured, level-based logging (text + JSON, contextual fields)
cargs	Command-line argument parsing
ns	Namespace management helpers
if	Interface / implementation binding
type	Type checking and normalisation
util	General utilities

Data & Time

Module	Description
time / time.util	Time accessors and utilities
tz	Timezone conversion (Olson/tz database)
convert	Type conversion functions
csv	CSV parsing and writing
rand	Random data generation

I/O & Files

Module	Description
file / file.hdb / file.kdb	Filesystem and HDB helpers
compress	HDB compression (qIPC, gzip, snappy, lz4hc, ZSTD)
os	OS-specific functionality
so	Shared-object function manager
terminal	Console management
env	Environment variables and .env file loading
parquet	Apache Parquet read/write via arrowkdb (optional)

Networking & Integrations

Module	Description
ipc	Inter-process communication
http / http.status	HTTP client (TLS, proxy, Basic/Bearer auth)
jschema	JSON schema validation for .j.k-parsed data
wsc	WebSocket client
cron	Job scheduler
event	Internal event management
mail	E-mail sending via mailx
slack	Slack notifications via webhook
py	PyKX (Python) integration (optional)

Module APIs are documented inline with qdoc annotations in each source file.

Documentation

A documentation site is built with MkDocs (see docs/ and mkdocs.yml): Getting Started, Core Concepts, Module Guides and API Reference. It is published to GitHub Pages on each release.

Examples

Runnable examples live in examples/:

• microservice/ — a REST service exposing JSON metrics
• tickerplant-subscriber/ — a market-data subscriber
• pykx-pipeline/ — a hybrid q + Python pipeline

Testing

See tests/. Run the suite with tests/run.sh (48 tests, green on kdb+ 4.1).

License

Licensed under the Apache License 2.0. See NOTICE for attribution.

Original work © Sport Trades Ltd and Jaskirat Rajasansir; qbase modifications © 2026 Evgen Bielozorov.

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_{Based on BuaBook/kdb-common, Apache-2.0.}