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benbjohnson/litestream

★ 13,554GoAudience · ops devopsComplexity · 3/5Setup · moderate

TLDR

Litestream is a background tool that continuously backs up a SQLite database to Amazon S3 or another location as changes happen, so a server crash never causes data loss without changing your application code.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((repo))
    What it does
      Continuous SQLite backup
      Stream changes live
      Disaster recovery
    How it works
      Background process
      No app code changes
      Safe via SQLite API
    Storage targets
      Amazon S3
      Local file path
      Kubernetes support
    Audience
      Backend developers
      Ops and DevOps
      Solo founders
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Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Run Litestream as a background process to stream all SQLite changes to Amazon S3 for automatic disaster recovery.

USE CASE 2

Deploy a SQLite-backed web app to production with continuous backup without touching any application code.

USE CASE 3

Restore a SQLite database from the continuous backup stream after a server crash or data loss event.

USE CASE 4

Run Litestream inside a Kubernetes pod alongside a SQLite-backed service for cloud-native backup.

Tech stack

Go

Getting it running

Difficulty · moderate Time to first run · 30min

Requires an S3 bucket or equivalent storage destination and a running SQLite database.

In plain English

Litestream is a tool that automatically backs up a SQLite database by continuously copying changes to another location as they happen. SQLite is a popular database format that stores all its data in a single file on disk. The problem with SQLite in production is that if your server crashes or loses data, you can lose everything since the last manual backup. Litestream solves that by running quietly in the background and streaming every change to a safe destination, such as Amazon S3 or another file location. The tool runs as a separate background process rather than sitting inside your application. It talks to SQLite through the official SQLite programming interface, which means it cannot corrupt your database even if something goes wrong. It only handles disaster recovery, not general database management. Setup and documentation are hosted on the Litestream website rather than in this repository, which keeps the README brief. The project is currently in beta status. It is written in Go and released under an open-source license. Contributors have helped add support for running it on Kubernetes and on OpenBSD in addition to more common server environments.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Show me how to set up Litestream to continuously back up a SQLite database to Amazon S3 on a Linux server.
Prompt 2
How do I restore a SQLite database from a Litestream backup after my server crashed and the original file was lost?
Prompt 3
Configure Litestream to replicate my SQLite database to a local file path on another disk instead of S3.
Prompt 4
How do I run Litestream as a sidecar container in a Kubernetes deployment next to my SQLite-backed app?
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