kuzudb/explorer repository overview

⁠KùzuExplorer

Browser-based user interface for the Kùzu⁠ graph database.

⁠Get started

KùzuExplorer is a web application that is launched from a deployed Docker image. Please refer to the Docker documentation⁠ for details on how to install and use Docker.

Below we show two different ways to launch KùzuExplorer. Each of these options make KùzuExplorer accessible on http://localhost:8000⁠. If the launching is successful, you should see the logs similar to the following in your shell:

Access mode: READ_WRITE
Version of Kùzu: v0.0.11
Deployed server started on port: 8000

⁠Option 1: Using an existing database

To access an existing Kùzu database, you can mount its path to the /database directory as follows:

docker run -p 8000:8000 \
           -v /absolute/path/to/database:/database \
           --rm kuzudb/explorer:latest

By mounting local database files to Docker via -v /absolute/path/to/database:/database, the changes done in the UI will persist to the local database files after the UI is shutdown.

The --rm flag tells docker that the container should automatically be removed after we close docker.

⁠Option 2: Start with an empty database with example data

You can also launch KùzuExplorer without specifying an existing database. KùzuExplorer comes with bundled datasets that you can use to explore the basic functionalities of Kùzu. This is simply done by removing the -v flag in the example above. If no database path is specified with -v, the server will be started with an empty database.

docker run -p 8000:8000 --rm kuzudb/explorer:latest

Click on the Datasets tab on the top right corner and then: (i) you can select one of the bundled dataset of your choice from the drow-down menu; (ii) load it into Kùzu by clicking the "Load Dataset" button; and (iii) finally use KùzuExplorer to explore it.

⁠Additional launch configurations

⁠Access mode

By default, KùzuExplorer is launched in read-write mode, which means that you can modify the database. If you want to launch KùzuExplorer in read-only mode, you can do so by setting the MODE environment variable to READ_ONLY as follows.

docker run -p 8000:8000 \
           -v /absolute/path/to/database:/database \
           -e MODE=READ_ONLY \
           --rm kuzudb/explorer:latest

In read-only mode, you can still issue read queries and visualize the results, but you cannot run write queries or modify the schema.

⁠Buffer pool size

By default, KùzuExplorer is launched with a maximum buffer pool size of 80% of the available memory. If you want to launch KùzuExplorer with a different buffer pool size, you can do so by setting the KUZU_BUFFER_POOL_SIZE environment variable to the desired value in bytes as follows.

For example, to launch KùzuExplorer with a buffer pool size of 1GB, you can run the following command.

docker run -p 8000:8000 \
           -v /absolute/path/to/database:/database \
           -e KUZU_BUFFER_POOL_SIZE=1073741824 \
           --rm kuzudb/explorer:latest

⁠Dev builds

If you want to launch KùzuExplorer with the latest development build of Kùzu, you can do so by using the dev tag instead of latest.

docker run -p 8000:8000 \
           -v /absolute/path/to/database:/database \
           --rm kuzudb/explorer:dev

The dev tag is updated daily, approximately two hours after the latest dev build of Kùzu is released.

⁠Updating KùzuExplorer

When a new version of KùzuExplorer is released after the initial launch, re-launching the container WILL NOT automatically update the local image to the latest version. To update the local image to the latest version, you can run the following command.

docker pull kuzudb/explorer:latest

After pulling the latest image, you can re-launch the container with the same command as before.

⁠Launch with Podman

If you are using Podman⁠ instead of Docker, you can launch KùzuExplorer by replacing docker with podman in the commands above. However, note that by default Podman maps the default user account to the root user in the container. This may cause permission issues when mounting local database files to the container. To avoid this, you can use the --userns=keep-id flag to keep the user ID of the current user inside the container, or enable :U option for each volume to change the owner and group of the source volume to the current user.

For example:

podman run -p 8000:8000 \
           -v /absolute/path/to/database:/database:U \
           --rm kuzudb/explorer:latest

or,

podman run -p 8000:8000 \
           -v /absolute/path/to/database:/database \
           --userns=keep-id \
           --rm kuzudb/explorer:latest

Please refer to the official Podman docs for mounting external volumes⁠ and user namespace mode⁠ for more information.

⁠Documentation

For more information regarding launching and using KùzuExplorer, please refer to the documentation⁠.