litestack is a revolutionary gem for Ruby and Ruby on Rails that provides an all-in-one solution for web application development. It exploits the power and embeddedness of SQLite to include a full-fledged SQL database, a fast cache and a robust job queue all in a single package.

Compared to conventional approaches that require separate servers and databases, Litestack offers superior performance, efficiency, ease of use, and cost savings. Its embedded database and cache reduce memory and CPU usage, while its simple interface streamlines the development process. Overall, LiteStack sets a new standard for web application development and is an excellent choice for those who demand speed, efficiency, and simplicity.

You can read more about why litestack can be a good choice for your next web application here, you might also be interested in litestack benchmarks.

litestack provides integration with popular libraries, including:

• Rack
• Sequel
• Rails
• ActiveRecord
• ActiveSupport::Cache
• ActiveJob

With litestack you only need to add a single gem to your app which would replace a host of other gems and services, for example, a typical Rails app using litestack will no longer need the following services:

• Database Server (e.g. PostgreSQL, MySQL)
• Cache Server (e.g. Redis, Memcached)
• Job Processor (e.g. Sidekiq, Goodjob)

To make it even more efficient, litestack will detect the presence of Fiber based IO frameworks like Async (e.g. when you use the Falcon web server) or Polyphony. It will then switch its background workers for caches and queues to fibers (using the semantics of the existing framework). This is done transparently and will generally lead to lower CPU and memory utilization.

Litestack is still pretty young and under heavy development, but you are welcome to give it a try today!.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'litestack'

And then execute:

$ bundle install

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install litestack

litestack currently offers three main components

• litedb
• litecache
• litejob

litedb is a wrapper around SQLite3, offering a better default configuration that is tuned for concurrency and performance. Out of the box, litedb works seamlessly between multiple processes without database locking errors. litedb can be used in multiple ways, including:

litedb can be used exactly as the SQLite3 gem, since litedb iherits from SQLite3

require 'litestack'
db = Litedb.new(path_to_db)
db.execute("create table users(id integer primary key, name text)")
db.execute("insert into users(name) values (?)", "Hamada")
db.get_first_value("select count(*) from users") # => 1

litedb provides tight Rails/ActiveRecord integration and can be configured as follows

In database.yml

adapter: litedb
# normal sqlite3 configuration follows

litedb offers integration with the Sequel database toolkit and can be configured as follows

DB = Sequel.connect("litedb://path_to_db_file")

litecache is a high speed, low overhead caching library that uses SQLite as its backend. litecache can be accessed from multiple processes on the same machine seamlessly. It also has features like key expiry, LRU based eviction and increment/decrement of integer values.

require 'litestack'
cache = Litecache.new(path: "path_to_file")
cache.set("key", "value")
cache.get("key") #=> "value"

In your desired environment file (e.g. production.rb)

config.cache_store = :litecache, {path: './path/to/your/cache/file'}

This provides a transparent integration that uses the Rails caching interface

litecache spawns a background thread for cleanup purposes. In case it detects that the current environment has Fiber::Scheduler or Polyphony loaded it will spawn a fiber instead, saving on both memory and CPU cycles.

More info about Litejob can be found in the litejob guide

litejob is a fast and very efficient job queue processor for Ruby applications. It builds on top of SQLite as well, which provides transactional guarantees, persistence and exceptional performance.

require 'litestack'
# define your job class
class MyJob
  include ::Litejob
      
  queue = :default
      
  # must implement perform, with any number of params
  def perform(params)
    # do stuff
  end
end
    
#schedule a job asynchronusly
MyJob.perform_async(params)
    
#schedule a job at a certain time
MyJob.perform_at(time, params)
    
#schedule a job after a certain delay
MyJob.perform_after(delay, params)

In your desired environment file (e.g. production.rb)

config.active_job.queue_adapter = :litejob

You can add more configuration in litejob.yml (or config/litejob.yml if you are integrating with Rails)

queues:
    - [default, 1]
    - [urgent, 5]
    - [critical, 10, "spawn"]

The queues need to include a name and a priority (a number between 1 and 10) and can also optionally add the token "spawn", which means every job will run it its own concurrency context (thread or fiber)

Bug reports are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/oldmoe/litestack. Please note that this is not an open contribution project and that we don't accept pull requests.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.