hivemind-ruby

hivemind-ruby - Object Relational Mapping for Hivemind

If you run your own hivemind node, you can leverage your local subset of the blockchain you've synchronized to Postgres using ActiveRecord.

What does that mean? It means if, for example, you have an existing Rails application, you can use this gem to access your hivemind node and access all of the data stored there.

Full documentation: http://www.rubydoc.info/gems/hivemind-ruby

Overview

What problem does this tool solve?

It allows you to bypass steemd and access a representation of the blockchain maintained by hivemind for certain types of queries.

Why would I want to bypass steemd? Isn't that the authoritative way to access the blockchain?

Yes, steemd is authoritative. But for certain kinds of queries, there are alternatives. For example, if you wanted to find all users that have the letter z in their account name, steemd is not the best tool.

Instead, we can use an SQL statement like:

SELECT "hive_accounts".*
FROM   "hive_accounts"
WHERE  (name LIKE '%z%');

But, you don't have to write this SQL. You can let ActiveRecord do it instead:

Hive::Account.where("name LIKE ?", '%z%')

To do this query comprehensively with steemd would require hours of API calls to find accounts that match. But using SQL, it takes less than a second.

What can I query with hivemind?

The focus of hivemind is on communities:

Developer-friendly microservice powering social networks on the Steem blockchain.

Hive is a "consensus interpretation" layer for the Steem blockchain, maintaining the state of social features such as post feeds, follows, and communities. Written in Python, it synchronizes an SQL database with chain state, providing developers with a more flexible/extensible alternative to the raw steemd API.

You should refer to the main hivemind purpose to determine specifically what blockchain data it will index.

This tool will allow rubyists to access the same database that hivemind maintains.

Getting Started

The hivemind-ruby gem is compatible with Ruby 2.2.5 or later. Also targets ActiveRecord 5.2, but older versions may work as well.

Installation

(Assuming that Ruby is installed on your computer, as well as RubyGems)

First, you need your own hivemind node. A hivemind node requires at least 310GB of HDD storage for the database (as of August of 2018).

Also install the minimal set of PostgreSQL binaries and headers requried for building 3rd-party applications:

Linux

$ apt-get install libpq-dev

macOS

Should already be provided if you have PostgreSQL provided by homebrew.

Verify psql

Once it's running and all synced, just make sure you can access Postgres locally, e.g.:

psql hive

If that works, you can use this gem. Keep in mind, if you stop the sync, your Postgres database will fall behind the head block. Once you resume, hivemind will pick up where it left off.

It's that easy!

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'hivemind-ruby', require: 'hive'

And then execute:

$ bundle install

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install hivemind-ruby

Usage

If you've already installed the gem, to check on your configuration, use this command from the terminal:

export DATABASE_URL=postgresql://user:pass@localhost:5432/hive
hivmind-ruby

Or, if you'd like to use the interactive ruby console with hive already required:

hivmind-ruby console

Here are a bunch of ActiveRecord queries you can do in your app (or from the interactive console).

This will return the number of accounts currently synced:

Hive::Account.count

To do the same as accounts, but for posts, this counts everything, including root posts and comments:

Hive::Post.count

This counts just the number of root posts (not comments):

Hive::Post.root_posts.count

This counts just the number of comments (not root posts):

Hive::Post.replies.count
Hive::Post.replies(parent_author: 'alice').count # just replies to alice
Hive::Post.replies(parent_author: %w(alice bob)).count # just replies to alice or bob

This will report the number of accounts with z in their name:

accounts = Hive::Account.where("name LIKE ?", '%z%')
accounts.count

This will show you the number of root posts by alice:

alice = Hive::Account.find_by_name 'alice'
alice.posts.root_posts.count

This will show you the number of reblogs by alice:

alice = Hive::Account.find_by_name 'alice'
alice.reblogged_posts.count

This is the number of accounts that alice follows:

alice = Hive::Account.find_by_name 'alice'
alice.following.count

This is the number of accounts that follow alice:

alice = Hive::Account.find_by_name 'alice'
alice.followers.count

The entire feed for alice (all content created by accounts alice follows, roughly analogous to https://steemit.com/@alice/feed):

alice = Hive::Account.find_by_name 'alice'
alice.feed.count

This is the entire discussion for the first post on the Steem platform (e.g.: https://steemit.com/@steemit/firstpost):

firstpost = Hive::Post.first
firstpost.discussion.count

To get the direct children of a post:

firstpost = Hive::Post.first
firstpost.children.count

Tests

• Clone the client repository into a directory of your choice:
  • git clone https://github.com/steemit/hivemind-ruby.git
• Navigate into the new folder
  • cd hivemind-ruby
• All tests can be invoked as follows:
  • DATABASE_URL=postgresql://user:pass@localhost:5432/hive bundle exec rake test

Contributions

Patches are welcome! Contributors are listed in the hivemind-ruby.gemspec file. Please run the tests (rake test) before opening a pull request and make sure that you are passing all of them. If you would like to contribute, but don't know what to work on, check the issues list.

Issues

When you find issues, please report them!

License

MIT