bigchaindb/docs/server/source/server-reference/bigchaindb-cli.md

Command Line Interface (CLI)

The command-line command to interact with BigchainDB Server is bigchaindb.

bigchaindb --help

Show help for the bigchaindb command. bigchaindb -h does the same thing.

bigchaindb --version

Show the version number. bigchaindb -v does the same thing.

bigchaindb configure

Generate a local configuration file (which can be used to set some or all BigchainDB node configuration settings). It will auto-generate a public-private keypair and then ask you for the values of other configuration settings. If you press Enter for a value, it will use the default value.

Since BigchainDB supports multiple databases you need to always specify the database backend that you want to use. At this point only two database backends are supported: rethinkdb and mongodb.

If you use the -c command-line option, it will generate the file at the specified path:

bigchaindb -c path/to/new_config.json configure rethinkdb

If you don't use the -c command-line option, the file will be written to $HOME/.bigchaindb (the default location where BigchainDB looks for a config file, if one isn't specified).

If you use the -y command-line option, then there won't be any interactive prompts: it will just generate a keypair and use the default values for all the other configuration settings.

bigchaindb -y configure rethinkdb

bigchaindb show-config

Show the values of the BigchainDB node configuration settings.

bigchaindb export-my-pubkey

Write the node's public key (i.e. one of its configuration values) to standard output (stdout).

bigchaindb init

Create a RethinkDB database, all RethinkDB database tables, 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

Drop (erase) 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

Start BigchainDB. It always begins by trying a bigchaindb init first. See the note in the documentation for bigchaindb init. You can also use the --dev-start-rethinkdb command line option to automatically start rethinkdb with bigchaindb if rethinkdb is not already running, e.g. bigchaindb --dev-start-rethinkdb start. Note that this will also shutdown rethinkdb when the bigchaindb process stops. The option --dev-allow-temp-keypair will generate a keypair on the fly if no keypair is found, this is useful when you want to run a temporary instance of BigchainDB in a Docker container, for example.

bigchaindb load

Write transactions to the backlog (for benchmarking tests). You can learn more about it using:

$ bigchaindb load -h

Note: This command uses the Python Server API to write transactions to the database. It doesn't use the HTTP API or a driver that wraps the HTTP API.

bigchaindb set-shards

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

bigchaindb set-replicas

Set the number of replicas (of each shard) in the underlying datastore. For example, the following command will set the number of replicas to three (i.e. it will set the replication factor to three):

$ bigchaindb set-replicas 3

bigchaindb add-replicas

This command is specific to MongoDB so it will only run if BigchainDB is configured with mongodb as the backend.

This command is used to add nodes to a BigchainDB cluster. It accepts a list of space separated hosts in the form hostname:port:

$ bigchaindb add-replicas server1.com:27017 server2.com:27017 server3.com:27017

bigchaindb remove-replicas

This command is specific to MongoDB so it will only run if BigchainDB is configured with mongodb as the backend.

This command is used to remove nodes from a BigchainDB cluster. It accepts a list of space separated hosts in the form hostname:port:

$ bigchaindb remove-replicas server1.com:27017 server2.com:27017 server3.com:27017