DBFlux

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An extensible, keyboard-first data platform delivered as a Rust + GPUI desktop client.

dbflux.dev · Documentation · Install

Overview

DBFlux is an open-source desktop client with built-in drivers for relational and non-relational databases. Its core contracts are driver-neutral, and external drivers can integrate over RPC.

The client focuses on performance, a clean UX, and keyboard-first workflows. The long-term goal is one fully open-source client for every database you work with.

Documentation

Everything below is published at docs.dbflux.dev, rendered from these same files, with search and a version selector. The links here point at the source; read them on the site if you prefer.

Choose the path that matches what you want to do.

Start here

Goal	Guide
Create a connection	Start with Getting Started. For SSH tunnels, proxies, AWS SSO, and value sources, use Connecting — Advanced Setup.
Run queries and follow common workflows	Follow the Usage Guide for querying, browsing results, charting, exporting, and keyboard navigation.
View audit events	Open the audit viewer with the audit viewer guide.
Use MCP	Follow the AI + MCP Integration Guide.
Check driver support and limitations	Use Drivers Overview, the canonical capability and limitations overview.

More user guides

• Settings & Hooks — settings, connection hooks, and access profiles
• Data & Privacy — data and secret storage, backup, and reset
• Lua Scripting — the embedded Lua runtime for hooks

Contributors

• Contributing — setup, checks, and contribution workflow
• Key Concepts — the short mental model for contracts and subsystem boundaries
• Driver Authoring — choose and implement a built-in Rust or external RPC driver
• Architecture — the canonical architecture and crate map, including crate boundaries and cross-crate flows

Translations

DBFlux is translated on Hosted Weblate. The catalogs live in crates/dbflux_i18n/locales/, one YAML file per language, and translation updates arrive as pull requests from Weblate. Contributing translations covers every translatable surface: the application UI, the documentation, and the website.

Reference

• Charts — chart types, column kinds, and axis auto-detection
• Dashboards — dashboards, saved charts, instance metrics, and inspectors
• Audit — audit event schema and redaction
• Driver RPC Protocol
• RPC Services Config
• Release Process
• Code Style
• Agent Instructions
• Claude Instructions

Installation

# Linux — install to /usr/local
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/0xErwin1/dbflux/main/scripts/install.sh | sudo bash

Packages for every platform — tarball, AUR, .deb, .rpm, AppImage, Nix, macOS DMG and the Windows installer — are on the Releases page. The full guide, including the Gatekeeper and SmartScreen steps for the unsigned macOS and Windows builds, is in Installing DBFlux.

Features

Database Support

• PostgreSQL with SSL/TLS modes (Disable, Prefer, Require)
• Amazon Redshift with read-only SQL over the PostgreSQL wire protocol, SSH tunneling, and TLS/client certificates
• MySQL / MariaDB
• SQLite for local database files
• Microsoft SQL Server (TDS) with TLS, SQL Browser named-instance routing, and multi-schema introspection
• MongoDB with collection browsing, document CRUD, and shell query generation
• Redis with key browsing for all types (String, Hash, List, Set, Sorted Set, Stream)
• DynamoDB with table browsing, item CRUD, and AWS authentication
• InfluxDB v1 and v2 (InfluxQL on v1, InfluxQL + Flux on v2)
• ClickHouse and ClickHouse Cloud over HTTP(S), with database/table discovery, visual SELECTs, and explicit raw SQL execution
• TursoDB and libSQL (sqld) over HTTP, with schema discovery, typed CRUD, and interactive transactions per editor tab
• CloudWatch Logs with log group/stream browsing and event streaming
• Amazon S3 with bucket browsing, object preview/editing, full CRUD, and presigned URLs, including S3-compatible endpoints (Cloudflare R2, MinIO)
• External drivers over RPC (register out-of-process drivers via the Driver RPC Protocol)

See docs/DRIVERS.md for a full capability matrix and per-driver limitations.

User Interface

• Document-based workspace with multiple result tabs (like DBeaver/VS Code)
• Collapsible, resizable sidebar with ToggleSidebar command (Ctrl+B)
• Schema tree browser with lazy loading for large databases
• Schema-level metadata: indexes, foreign keys, constraints, custom types (PostgreSQL)
• Stored procedures / routines folder per schema (drivers that expose them)
• Multi-tab SQL editor with syntax highlighting and multi-statement execution (one result set per statement, where the driver supports it)
• Virtualized data table with column resizing, horizontal scrolling, and sorting
• Table browser with WHERE filters, custom LIMIT, and pagination
• Workspace inspector rail for row/document details
• "Copy as Query" context menu to copy INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE as SQL, MongoDB shell, or Redis commands
• Query preview modal with language-specific syntax highlighting
• Command palette with fuzzy search
• Custom toast notification system with auto-dismiss
• Background task panel
• Session restore: open tabs are restored on startup, and a recovered draft that differs from its file is never written over it

Visual Query Builder

• Right-rail SELECT builder: projection, joins, a nested WHERE predicate tree, ORDER BY, and LIMIT/OFFSET, with a live parameterized SQL preview
• GROUP BY with aggregates (COUNT, SUM, AVG, MIN, MAX) and HAVING
• Visual UPDATE / DELETE builder with mutation policies (read-only / approval-required) and chunked, cancellable execution
• Schema-aware autocomplete on builder inputs and the results WHERE filter
• Relational filters in the results filter bar via dotted foreign-key paths (e.g. created_by.email LIKE '%@acme.com')
• Inline cell edit and row delete on builder-generated results when they map 1:1 to a single table
• Saved visual queries per connection
• SQL drivers only (SQLite, PostgreSQL, MySQL/MariaDB, SQL Server); driver-agnostic by construction

Charts & Visualization

• Chart any query or collection result: Line, Bar, Scatter, Area, Stacked Bar, and Pie
• Automatic axis detection from column kinds (timestamp X axis, numeric Y series) — no per-driver heuristics
• Saved charts that reopen as their own document tab
• Dashboards: arrange saved charts, dividers, and inspector panels on a 12-column grid with a shared time range
• Read-only Instance Overview per connection — live server metrics and tabular inspectors, with "Save as editable"; PostgreSQL, MySQL/MariaDB, MongoDB, Redis, and SQL Server ship instance catalogs
• Browse and import upstream provider dashboards (CloudWatch)
• See docs/CHARTS.md and docs/DASHBOARDS.md for details

Connectivity & Access

• SSH tunnels with key, password, and agent authentication; reusable SSH tunnel profiles
• SOCKS5 / HTTP CONNECT proxy tunnels with reusable proxy profiles
• Managed access providers (AWS SSM) for connecting without exposing ports
• Provider-driven auth profiles (e.g. AWS SSO/shared/static), with import from ~/.aws/config
• Connection hooks at PreConnect/PostConnect/PreDisconnect/PostDisconnect, runnable as a command, a script, or in-process Lua

AI & MCP Integration

• Built-in Model Context Protocol (MCP) server (dbflux mcp) for AI clients
• Governance layer: operation classification, role/policy engine, trusted clients, and human approval flow for write/destructive operations
• See docs/MCP_AI_INTEGRATION.md

Audit & Scripting

• SQLite-backed audit log for queries, connections, hooks, scripts, MCP, governance, and config events, with redaction and query fingerprinting — see docs/AUDIT.md
• Centralized user-facing error reporting: failures surface as a toast with a correlation id and a "View in Audit" action, drive a status-bar error badge, and are correlated with their audit row
• Lua, Python, and Bash scripts run as documents with live streamed output — see docs/LUA.md

Keyboard Navigation

• Vim-style navigation (j/k/h/l) throughout the app
• Context-aware keybindings (Document, Sidebar, BackgroundTasks)
• Document focus with internal editor/results navigation
• Results toolbar: f to focus, h/l to navigate, Enter to edit/execute, Esc to exit
• Toggle sidebar with Ctrl+B
• Tab switching (MRU order) with Ctrl+Tab / Ctrl+Shift+Tab

Query Management

• Query history with timestamps
• Saved queries with favorites
• Search across history and saved queries

Export

• Shape-based export: CSV, JSON (pretty/compact), Text, Binary (raw/hex/base64)
• Export format determined by result type (table, JSON, text, binary)

Development

Prerequisites

On Linux, the mold linker is required for local builds: the repo's .cargo/config.toml links the x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu target with -fuse-ld=mold to cut link time and memory across the 60+ workspace crates. The Nix dev shell provides it automatically; for non-Nix setups install it via your package manager (included below). Windows and macOS use their default linker and are unaffected.

Ubuntu/Debian:

sudo apt install pkg-config libssl-dev libdbus-1-dev libxkbcommon-dev mold

Fedora:

sudo dnf install pkg-config openssl-devel dbus-devel libxkbcommon-devel mold

Arch:

sudo pacman -S pkg-config openssl dbus libxkbcommon mold

macOS:

# Xcode Command Line Tools (required)
xcode-select --install

Windows:

# Visual Studio Build Tools with C++ workload (required)
# Download from: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/visual-cpp-build-tools/

Building

cargo build -p dbflux --release

Running

cargo run -p dbflux

Commands

cargo check --workspace                    # Type checking
python3 scripts/lint.py clippy             # Lint
python3 scripts/lint.py fmt                # Format
cargo test --workspace                     # Tests

Faster tests with nextest

cargo-nextest is the recommended test runner for this workspace: it runs each test in its own process across a global pool, which is noticeably faster than cargo test on a workspace this size. The Nix dev shell provides it; otherwise install it from https://nexte.st/docs/installation.

cargo nextest run --workspace              # unit + integration tests
cargo test --doc --workspace               # doctests (nextest does not run these)

Live integration tests (normally #[ignore]d) use a different flag under nextest:

cargo nextest run -p dbflux_driver_sqlite --run-ignored all

Website

The site under web/ is an Astro static build. It reads docs/, the driver READMEs, ARCHITECTURE.md and CONTRIBUTING.md out of git, one set per published version, so editing a document is all that is needed to change what the site shows.

cd web
pnpm install
pnpm dev          # local server
pnpm build        # static output in web/dist
pnpm check        # types
pnpm format       # prettier

Which versions are published is declared in web/versions.json. Each entry names a git ref; the product version shown for it is read from that ref's Cargo.toml.

DOCS_MODE decides where the documentation is served: embedded (the default, everything on one origin under /docs/), or site and docs for a split deployment across two hosts. Local development uses the default, so one command still brings up the whole site.

Nix Development Shell

If you use Nix, you can enter a development shell with all dependencies:

# With flakes
nix develop

# Traditional
nix-shell

License

MIT & Apache-2.0. The DBFlux name and logo are covered by the Trademark Policy, not by the code license.

DBFlux collects no data. See the Privacy Policy.

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