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