PersonalDB

A serverless personal SQLite database accessed over HTTP.

Based on litestream-cloud-run-example

Components of this service are

• A minimal go http server that sends queries to SQLite
• Google Cloud Run - used to provide serverless compute, scales to 0 within 15 minutes of your last query
• Litestream - used to sync the state of the database to GCS object storage - no expensive file system required

Why?

I wanted a simple way to store personal data (notes, things I would normally put in a spreadsheet), and query it using SQL.

Most cheap/free options with public clouds are either not relational databases (e.g. DynamoDB) or have a short free trial (fundamentally beause they use expensive file systems).

Running a database server on a VM or locally is more expensive, and I don't want to manage it. Additionally connecting to these databases requires using some sort of sql client, which is not ideal for a mobile device.

This project uses a SQLite database, which is a single file, and syncs it to Google Cloud Storage using Litestream. It exposes a HTTP API, so if you have curl, you can use it.

Usage

Prerequisites

• Google Cloud Account and project
• Pick a region based on GCPPing
• Create a Cloud Storage bucket in a the same region
• Install the google cloud cli

Build & deploy the sample to Cloud Run

Note: If you dont have a development environment all these steps can be done in the Google Cloud Shell (and its even a bit easier as the cli is pre installed).

Clone this repository and navigate to the cloned location.

git clone git@github.com:michaelbanfield/personaldb.git
cd personaldb

Then build and deploy the application with the following command:

gcloud beta run deploy personaldb \
  --source .  \
  --set-env-vars REPLICA_URL=gcs://BUCKET_NAME/database \
  --max-instances 1 \
  --execution-environment gen2 \
  --no-cpu-throttling \
  --region REGION \
  --project PROJECT_ID

Replace:

• BUCKET_NAME with your Cloud Storage bucket name
• REGION with the same region where you created the bucket, for example us-central1
• PROJECT_ID with your Google Cloud project ID.

When the deployment completes, take note of .run.app URL of the Cloud Run service. and run the following.

alias personaldb="curl -H 'Authorization: Bearer $(gcloud auth print-identity-token)' https://<YOUR_URL>.run.app/query -d"
personaldb "CREATE TABLE notes (
    id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
    title TEXT NOT NULL,
    body TEXT NOT NULL,
    created_at DATETIME DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
    modified_at DATETIME DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP
);"
personaldb "INSERT INTO notes (title, body) VALUES ('Hello', 'World');"
personaldb "SELECT * FROM notes;"

Security

The cloud run configuration above requires authentication to access the service. This is done using a bearer token, which is generated using the gcloud auth print-identity-token command.

You can follow the instructions to add extra users here.

It is not recommended to expose this service publically.

Development

The http server can be run locally with

go run main.go --dsn=database.db

Which will just create an empty database.