Command line

The BoxDB command line database, with typed SQLite columns, SQL migrations and optional readable YAML storage.

Install with Homebrew on macOS or Linux:

brew install lebedev-nikita/tap/boxdb

Homebrew installs a standalone binary without Node.js. Apple Silicon macOS and x86-64 Linux use release binaries; Intel macOS and ARM64 Linux build from source with Rust and CMake. See the tap for release updates. Upgrade with brew update && brew upgrade boxdb.

Alternatively, install through npm:

npm install -g @boxdb/cli

Then run:

boxdb data.db -e "CREATE TABLE users(name TEXT); INSERT INTO users VALUES('Ada'); SELECT * FROM users;"

Or run without a global installation:

npx @boxdb/cli --help

The npm package requires Node.js 22.18+ on macOS ARM64 (macOS 11+) or Linux x64 or ARM64 with glibc 2.35+ (Ubuntu 22.04+ or 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm+). All three binaries are included in the npm package; no Rust compiler, installation scripts or additional downloads are needed. Alpine/musl, Windows, Intel macOS and 32-bit ARM are not supported by this npm release.

To switch from an existing global installation, first install and verify Homebrew’s binary with "$(brew --prefix)/bin/boxdb" --version. Then remove the old package using its original package manager:

npm uninstall -g @boxdb/cli
# Or, for a Bun global installation:
bun remove -g @boxdb/cli

Open a new shell or run rehash in zsh (hash -r in bash). Check command -v boxdb and boxdb --version; the command should resolve through Homebrew’s bin directory.

For Raspberry Pi without Node.js, download the CLI archive from GitHub releases. Choose aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu for a 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS, extract it and run ./boxdb. It requires glibc 2.35+.

Run boxdb data.db for the interactive shell, or pipe SQL on stdin. --help lists options and subcommands; .help lists shell commands.

Use boxdb check data.db --full for diagnostics. boxdb repair data.db repaired.db --rebuild-indexes rebuilds indexes, and boxdb recover damaged.db recovered.db salvages available data. Both write new destinations. See recovery contracts and limitations.

See the BoxDB documentation for storage formats, supported types, migrations and language clients.