The BigchainDB Command Line Interface (CLI)¶
The command to interact with BigchainDB is bigchaindb
. This section provides an overview of the command.
bigchaindb¶
bigchaindb –help¶
One can get basic help with the bigchaindb
command using bigchaindb --help
or bigchaindb -h
.
bigchaindb configure¶
This command generates a public/private keypair for the node, and writes a BigchainDB configuration file to the node’s file system. It’s documented in the section Configuring a BigchainDB Node.
If you want to force-generate a new configuration file regardless of whether one already exists (i.e. skipping the yes/no prompt), then use bigchaindb -y configure
.
bigchaindb show-config¶
This command shows the values of the configuration settings, which can come from a variety of sources. See the section on configuring BigchainDB for more details and examples.
bigchaindb export-my-pubkey¶
This command writes the node’s public key (i.e. one of its configuration values) to standard output (stdout).
bigchaindb init¶
This command creates a RethinkDB database, two RethinkDB database tables (backlog and bigchain), various RethinkDB database indexes, and the genesis block.
Note: The bigchaindb start
command (see below) always starts by trying a bigchaindb init
first. If it sees that the RethinkDB database already exists, then it doesn’t re-initialize the database. One doesn’t have to do bigchaindb init
before bigchaindb start
. bigchaindb init
is useful if you only want to initialize (but not start).
bigchaindb drop¶
This command drops (erases) the RethinkDB database. You will be prompted to make sure. If you want to force-drop the database (i.e. skipping the yes/no prompt), then use bigchaindb -y drop
bigchaindb start¶
This command starts BigchainDB. It always begins by trying a bigchaindb init
first. See the note in the documentation for bigchaindb init
.
bigchaindb load¶
This command is used to run benchmarking tests. You can learn more about it using:
$ bigchaindb load -h
bigchaindb set-shards¶
This command is used to set the number of shards in the underlying datastore. For example, the following command will set the number of shards to four:
$ bigchaindb set-shards 4