Creating a Local RethinkDB Database for Development

In this tutorial, you will:

• Create a RethinkDB Container for Development
• (Advanced) Clone a small Node.js application and write data into RethinkDB.

Setting up RethinkDB in Kitematic

First, download and start Kitematic if you haven’t yet done so. Once you’re in, the app should look like this:

Click on the Create button of the rethinkdb image listing in the recommended list as shown above. This will download & run a RethinkDB container within a few minutes. Once it’s done, you’ll have a local RethinkDB database up and running.

Let’s start using it to develop a node.js app. For now let’s figure out on which IP address and Port RethinkDB is listening! Awesome! To find which ports it’s listening on, click the Settings tab and then the Ports section:

There! We can see that for RethinkDB Port 28015, the container is listening on host 192.168.99.100 and port 49154 (in this example - it may be different for you). This means we can now reach RethinkDB via a client driver at 192.168.99.100:49154. Again, this may be different for you.

(Advanced) Saving Data into RethinkDB with a local Node.js App

First download and install Node.js if you don’t have it yet.

We’ll create the RethinkDB example chat to test drive our new database. In the Terminal, type:

bash-3.2$ export RDB_HOST=192.168.99.100 # replace with IP from above step
bash-3.2$ export RDB_PORT=49154 # replace with Port from above step
bash-3.2$ git clone https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb-example-nodejs-chat
bash-3.2$ cd rethinkdb-example-nodejs-chat
bash-3.2$ npm install
bash-3.2$ npm start

Then open a browser at http://localhost:8000. Congratulations! you’ve used a RethinkDB container in Kitematic to build a real-time chat app. Happy coding!