Local development

Local Development

Although you can connect directly to a managed or self hosted instance of a remote Triplit Database, you can also run a local instance of Triplit Database for development purposes. This not only helps separate your development and production environments, but Triplit's local development toolkit provides a lot of help for deploying updates to the Database. For this reason, we recommend running a local instance of Triplit Database when building most projects.

Install the CLI

If you haven't already, install the Triplit CLI and initialize a project. You can find instructions for doing so here.

Start Triplit services

To start Triplit services, run the following command in your project directory:

npx triplit dev

By default this will start the following services:

  • Triplit Console, running at https://console.triplit.dev/local
  • Triplit Database server, running at http://localhost:6543

And prints a usable Service Token and Anonymous Token for connecting to the database.

Additional environment variables

If your project has a .env file, you may set the following environment variables to configure the Triplit Database server:

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If you're using a framework like Vite (opens in a new tab) or Next.js (opens in a new tab) you should add additional environmental variables prepended with VITE_ or NEXT_PUBLIC_ respectively for the DB_URL and ANONYMOUS_TOKEN. For example, TRIPLIT_DB_URL would become VITE_TRIPLIT_DB_URL or NEXT_PUBLIC_TRIPLIT_DB_URL.

  • TRIPLIT_SERVICE_TOKEN - The Service Token to use for connecting to the database for CLI commands. If not set, you may use a flag in the CLI (which takes precedent) or the CLI will prompt you for a key.
  • TRIPLIT_DB_URL - The URL to use for connecting to the database. If not set, you may use a flag in the CLI (which takes precedent) or use the default URL for the local database.
  • TRIPLIT_JWT_SECRET - Overrides the JWT secret used when generating local api tokens.
  • TRIPLIT_EXTERNAL_JWT_SECRET - Overrides the JWT secret used when generating external api tokens.
  • TRIPLIT_CLAIMS_PATH - A . separated path to read Triplit claims on external api tokens. If not set, claims are assumed to be at the root of the token.
  • TRIPLIT_MAX_BODY_SIZE - The maximum body size for incoming requests. This is useful if you want to send large payloads to your server. The default value is 100, corresponding to 100MB.
Offline modeSeeding a database