Selda
What is Selda?
Selda is a Haskell library for interacting with SQL-based relational databases.
It was inspired by LINQ and
Opaleye.
Features
- Monadic interface.
- Portable: backends for SQLite and PostgreSQL.
- Generic: easy integration with your existing Haskell types.
- Creating, dropping and querying tables using type-safe database schemas.
- Typed query language with products, filtering, joins and aggregation.
- Inserting, updating and deleting rows from tables.
- Conditional insert/update.
- Transactions, uniqueness constraints and foreign keys.
- Type-safe, backend-specific functionality, such as JSON lookups.
- Seamless prepared statements.
- Lightweight and modular: few dependencies, and non-essential features are
optional or split into add-on packages.
Getting started
Install the selda
package from Hackage, as well as at least one of the
backends:
$ cabal update
$ cabal install selda selda-sqlite selda-postgresql
Then, read the tutorial.
The API documentation will probably
also come in handy.
Requirements
Selda requires GHC 8.0+, as well as SQLite 3.7.11+ or PostgreSQL 9.4+.
To build the SQLite backend, you need a C compiler installed.
To build the PostgreSQL backend, you need the libpq
development libraries
installed (libpq-dev
on Debian-based Linux distributions).
Hacking
Contributing
All forms of contributions are welcome!
If you have a bug to report, please try to include as much information as
possible, preferably including:
- A brief description (one or two sentences) of the bug.
- The version of Selda+backend where the bug was found.
- A step-by-step guide to reproduce the bug.
- The expected result from following these steps.
- What actually happens when following the steps.
- Which component contains the bug (selda, selda-sqlite or selda-postgresql),
if you're reasonably sure about where the bug is.
Bonus points for a small code example that illustrates the problem.
If you want to contribute code, please consult the following checklist before
sending a pull request:
- Does the code build with a recent version of GHC?
- Do all the tests pass?
- Have you added any tests covering your code?
If you want to contribute code but don't really know where to begin,
issues tagged good first issue are a good start.
Setting up the build environment
From the repository root:
- Install
libpq-dev
from your package manager.
This is required to build the PostgreSQL backend.
- Make sure you're running a cabal version that supports v2-style commands.
- Familiarise yourself with the various targets in the makefile.
The dependencies between Selda, the backends and the tests are slightly
complex, so straight-up cabal is too quirky for day to day hacking.
Setting up a VM for PostgreSQL testing
While the SQLite backend is completely self-contained, the PostgreSQL backend
needs an appropriate server for testing. Setting this up in a virtual machine
is definitely less intrusive than setting up a server on your development
machine. To set up a VM for the PostgreSQL backend tests:
- Install your favourite hypervisor, such as VMWare player or VirtualBox.
- Download a pre-built PostgreSQL VM from
Bitnami.
- Import the OVA file into your hypervisor.
- Change the network settings of your newly imported VM to NAT, and make sure
that port 5432 is forwarded. Note that this will conflict with any PostgreSQL
server running on your machine while the VM is running.
- Boot your VM and note the password displayed on the login screen.
- Create the file
selda-tests/PGConnectInfo.hs
with the following content:
{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}
module PGConnectInfo where
import Database.Selda.PostgreSQL
pgConnectInfo = "test" `on` "localhost" `auth` ("postgres", "$PASSWORD")
Where $PASSWORD
is the password from the VM's login screen.
- Log in to the VM and disable the built-in firewall by running
sudo systemctl disable ufw ; sudo systemctl stop ufw
.
- From your host machine, create the test database:
$ psql -h 127.0.0.1 -U postgres -W
[password from login screen]
# CREATE DATABASE test;
# \q
- Run
make pgtest
to check that everything works.
TODOs
Features that would be nice to have but are not yet implemented.
- Monadic if/else
- Streaming
- MySQL/MariaDB backend
- MSSQL backend