Getting started

EventStore is available in Hex and can be installed as follows:

  1. Add eventstore to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

     def deps do
       [{:eventstore, "~> 1.0"}]
     end

    Run mix deps.get to install the new dependency.

  2. Define an event store module for your application:

     defmodule MyApp.EventStore do
       use EventStore, otp_app: :my_app
    
       # Optional `init/1` function to modify config at runtime.
       def init(config) do
         {:ok, config}
       end
     end
  3. Add a config entry containing the PostgreSQL database connection details for your event store module to each environment's mix config file (e.g. config/dev.exs):

     config :my_app, MyApp.EventStore,
       serializer: EventStore.JsonSerializer,
       username: "postgres",
       password: "postgres",
       database: "eventstore",
       hostname: "localhost"
    
     # OR use a URL to connect instead
     config :my_app, MyApp.EventStore,
       serializer: EventStore.JsonSerializer,          
       url: "postgres://postgres:postgres@localhost/eventstore"

    Configure optional database connection settings:

     config :my_app, MyApp.EventStore,
       pool_size: 10
       pool_overflow: 5
       queue_target: 50
       queue_interval: 1_000

    The database connection pool configuration options are:

    • :pool_size - The number of connections (default: 10).
    • :pool_overflow - The maximum number of overflow connections to start if all connections are checked out (default: 0).

    Handling requests is done through a queue. When DBConnection is started, there are two relevant options to control the queue:

    • :queue_target - in milliseconds (default: 50ms).
    • :queue_interval - in milliseconds (default: 1,000ms).
  4. Add your event store module to the event_stores list for your app in mix config:

     # config/config.exs
     config :my_app, event_stores: [MyApp.EventStore]

    This ensures the event store mix tasks can be run without specifying the event store as a command line argument (e.g. mix event_store.init -e MyApp.EventStore).

  5. Create and initialize the event store database and tables using the mix tasks:

     $ mix do event_store.create, event_store.init
  6. The final piece of configuration is to setup your event store as a supervisor within your application's supervision tree (e.g. in lib/my_app/application.ex, inside the start/2 function):

     defmodule MyApp.Application do
       use Application
    
       def start(_type, _args) do
         children = [
           MyApp.EventStore
         ]
    
         opts = [strategy: :one_for_one, name: MyApp.Supervisor]
         Supervisor.start_link(children, opts)
       end
     end

Using an existing database

You can use an existing PostgreSQL database with EventStore by running the following mix task to create and initialize the event store tables:

$ mix event_store.init

Reset an existing database

To drop an existing EventStore database and recreate it you can run the following mix tasks:

$ mix do event_store.drop, event_store.create, event_store.init

Warning this will delete all EventStore data.

Initialize a database using a Elixir releases

If you're using an Elixir release build by the task mix release you won't have mix available therefore you won't be able to run the following command in order to initialize a new database.

$ mix do event_store.create, event_store.init

To do that you can use task modules defined inside EventStore (in lib/mix/tasks):

So you can take advantage of the running one-off commands supported by Mix release, using a helper module defined like this:

defmodule MyApp.ReleaseTasks do
  def init_event_store do
    {:ok, _} = Application.ensure_all_started(:postgrex)
    {:ok, _} = Application.ensure_all_started(:ssl)

    :ok = Application.load(:eventstore)

    config = EventStore.Config.parsed()

    :ok = EventStore.Tasks.Create.exec(config, [])
    :ok = EventStore.Tasks.Init.exec(config, [])
  end
end

Event data and metadata data type

EventStore has support for persisting event data and metadata as either:

  • Binary data, using the bytea data type, designed for storing binary strings.
  • JSON data, using the jsonb data type, specifically designed for storing JSON encoded data.

The default data type is bytea. This can be used with any binary serializer, such as the Erlang Term format, JSON data encoded to binary, and other serialization formats.

Using the jsonb data type

The advantage this format is that it allows you to execute ad-hoc SQL queries against the event data or metadata using PostgreSQL's native JSON query support.

To enable native JSON support you need to configure your event store to use the jsonb data type. You must also use the EventStore.JsonbSerializer serializer, to ensure event data and metadata is correctly serialized to JSON, and include the Postgres types module (EventStore.PostgresTypes) for the Postgrex library to support JSON.

# config/config.exs
config :my_app, MyApp.EventStore,
  column_data_type: "jsonb"
  serializer: EventStore.JsonbSerializer,
  types: EventStore.PostgresTypes

Finally, you need to include the Jason library as a depencency in mix.exs to enable Postgrex JSON support and then run mix deps.get to install.

# mix.exs
defp deps do
  [{:jason, "~> 1.1"}]
end

These settings must be configured before creating the EventStore database. It's not possible to migrate between bytea and jsonb data types once you've created the database. This must be decided in advance.