Rainfrog – a database management TUI for Postgres

https://github.com/achristmascarl/rainfrog

by achristmascarl • 2 years ago

192 49 2 years ago

github.com

cies3• 2 years ago

since Wayland there are some issues with DBeaver; this project seems like a great way out!

aa-jv3• 2 years ago

What are some of the issues?

cies3• 2 years ago

popups are windows. selecting+copying text from the results-table does not work the first time. clicking in the left pane on a connection sometimes picks the wrong one (really weird this one as it is not consistent). i only see the standard wayland icon (not the worst).

vimeh• 2 years ago

Looks sleek! But I’m curious, what made you decide that gobang[0] wasn’t cutting it for you?

[0] https://github.com/TaKO8Ki/gobang

emmanueloga_• 2 years ago

There are a bunch of these, like [1] and [2], probably a lot more.

1: https://harlequin.sh/

2: https://www.pgcli.com/

joshka2• 2 years ago

Gobang seems stagnated (no PRs merged since last year), which is a shame.

achristmascarl10• 2 years ago

main reason was that it hadn't been updated in a while. i also wanted the query editor to be more flexible / not limited to just filtering

samaysharma• 2 years ago

What would you say are the key benefits of using this over psql? Is it mainly table metadata and properties?

Asking because running queries, history, formatting of results etc. can be achieved by configuring psqlrc.

jonathanyc3• 2 years ago

Not OP, but I personally put off using a UI for years before finally trying a few and eventually settling on Postico for Mac. I still jump to psql often, but for me it's an accumulation of small quality-of-life improvements:

- results are formatted nicely by default; no more doing a first query, getting too many columns so results wrap unreadably, then changing the columns for a second query, and so on

- manually editing rows is as easy as with a spreadsheet; of course hopefully you don't have to do this often...

- I can change common filters & sorts in the UI with a few clicks instead of having to change SQL; sure, the SQL would only require typing a few characters, but if it's 2 clicks vs. 8 characters, it's still a small win

Downsides are:

- the GUI has an interface for saving queries, but it refuses to let me save them to a subfolder of my project; it wants to save them all in some global location. This doesn't seem good for sharing queries

- if you are doing more complicated sorting or aggregation, it's still easier to just go to psql than to fiddle with the GUI

wazoox• 2 years ago

For results formatting, line selection, etc simply installing pspg as your psql pager helps a lot.

codesnik• 2 years ago

would symlinks in that global location help, maybe?

achristmascarl10• 2 years ago

a big one for me is being able to jump between/search for tables and preview their rows, columns, and indexes quickly; especially when there are many tables/schemas and i don't remember their names

another one is a more comfortable editing experience for queries

jonathanyc3• 2 years ago

I didn’t learn this until recently but in psql you can use \e or \editor to open the current line in $EDITOR. It helps a lot.

askvictor• 2 years ago

Looking forward to trying it, though would be nice if credentials could be specified in a different way than on the command line (whereby they'll get saved into your command line history).

tbrb• 2 years ago

Agree that it would be nice to specify credentials a different way - however as a workaround: some bash-based shells support prefixing the command with a space as a way of not saving that command into history.

Ref: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Bash-Vari...

maxbond• 2 years ago

`psql` allows for putting your credentials in a dotfile with a very simple syntax. Should be quick to add support for, and would create a seamless onboarding experience for people who are already using `psql`.

pcthrowaway• 2 years ago

Generally if you put a space before your command it'll bypass the history, though depending on your *nix you might need to set `HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth` in your bashrc or similar if it's not already.

achristmascarl10• 2 years ago

that makes sense, thank you for opening an issue!

ktaube• 2 years ago

Been seeing lots of cool TUIs built with ratatui. Can anyone offer a comparison between ratatui and Golang https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea?

I've been wanting to get into building a TUI but can't decide which library to pick.

Rizu• 2 years ago

I second this, could some also add C#'s "Spectre.Console" https://github.com/spectreconsole/spectre.console

viraptor• 2 years ago

I found it but great in handling interactivity compared to https://github.com/gui-cs/Terminal.Gui

kjuulh• 2 years ago

I've been using both.

Charm/bubbletea toolstack, is very much focused on an ELM style architecture, I.e. message passing and deriving UI from state. You can still do immediate type UI if that is what you prefer, but it won't fit with any of the standard components. Bubbletea is a framework more or less, so even if you know Go, it will require you to learn how to build to its strengths.

Ratatui is by default not very opinionated about how to handle state and updates, which requires some development from you, or using a third party library to get an opinionated architecture around it. Ratatui is more of a collection of libraries, out of the box, it expects a certain interface for components, but it is up to you how you want to compose them together. Whether that is immediate-, stateful-, react-, or ELM style. Stateful is the default for all their examples.

Charms way of doing terminal UI is very much based around strings, which can sometimes give issues with spacing, as components can be fiddly to be constrained within a certain space.

Ratatui creates UI on top of a matrix of bytes, which makes it more difficult to do easy things, but allows you to more easily build complex uis.

Generally I prefer Ratatui, as you can really build robust and fast uis on top of it. It does take a bit more work to get started though. I am also biased by Rust tho.

joshka2• 2 years ago

Ratatui maintainer here. I'd agree with all of the above points.

The lack of opinionated approach stems from Ratatui being not a framework, but a library (you call us, we don't call you), and not having any of the event/input handling things included.

There's likely room for a framework or two on top of it.

j_m_b• 2 years ago

Nice work! Would be cool to have a plugin system that could allow for interfacing with other DBs like sqlite etc.

achristmascarl10• 2 years ago

thank you! support for other DBs is planned, starting with mysql and sqlite. no set timeline yet though

me_vinayakakv2• 2 years ago

Nice! I see DBeaver and DataGrip implementing connection layer through JDBC.

Not sure if that would be a viable option in Rust.

sgarland2• 2 years ago

This looks excellent, with one potential caveat: does it support slash commands (e.g. \dt)?

achristmascarl10• 2 years ago

it does not unfortunately; open to suggestions about common slash commands ppl would like to see included as shortcuts!

sgarland2• 2 years ago

All of them would be great, but if not, the most common ones IME are:

    \c
    \d
    \di
    \dt

And the variants (e.g. \dti+)

benterix• 2 years ago

I'm new to Rust, can someone tell me if that's good Rust code I could learn from?

https://github.com/achristmascarl/rainfrog/blob/main/src/app...

Icathian• 2 years ago

I only looked at the linked file, so I'm not going to speak to the rest of the code and don't really have a good grasp of the architecture here.

This seems mostly ok. The only thing that (imo) wouldn't pass code review is that big honking loop at https://github.com/achristmascarl/rainfrog/blob/main/src/app.... That thing needs to be refactored down to be readable, with individual logic chunks being put into their own functions and tidied up a bit.

That's not really Rust-specific, obviously, but all the `match` and `if let` and whatever other Rust stuff looks fine, so it's what I've got.

achristmascarl10• 2 years ago

nope :)

achristmascarl10• 2 years ago

on a more serious note, the library i used for the query editor, tui-textarea [0], is very well done, and the other db tui i drew inspiration from, gobang[1], is a great example of a ratatui app. would recommend checking those out

[0] https://github.com/rhysd/tui-textarea

[1] https://github.com/TaKO8Ki/gobang

dmd• 2 years ago

(People downvoting this: that's the author.)

ellisv• 2 years ago

Looks pretty cool. I could see this being useful for some of my coworkers. I might try it with read-only access.

I pretty much always use DataGrip or pgcli and don't see that changing, but will keep an eye on this.

me_vinayakakv2• 2 years ago

Yeah. Reminds me of k9s.

yard2010• 2 years ago

Lazydocker too. I'm not affiliated, just in love

simonw• 2 years ago

Here's a trick for running this against a Heroku PostgreSQL database (here for a Heroku app called "simonwillisonblog"):

    rainfrog --url $(heroku config:get DATABASE_URL -a simonwillisonblog)

jgalentine007• 2 years ago

I really like this, and I think others will too. Please be judicious with feature requests - so far the simplicity and ease of use is what I like most about it!

achristmascarl10• 2 years ago

thank you! and noted :)

Rainfrog – a database management TUI for Postgres

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