Documentation

Engines

Install, inspect, and remove database engines — series resolution, LTS and innovation tracks, version cache.

Concept

An engine is an installed database distribution — the analogue of a Docker image. Engines are versioned, cached once under DBPOD_HOME/versions, and shared by every project on the machine. Instances (the analogue of containers) are created from engines.

Install

dbpod engine install mysql@8.0

Series resolution

You normally reference an engine by series (mysql@8.0), not by full version. Resolution rules:

  1. If a suitable version of the series already exists locally, it is reused.
  2. Otherwise the series resolves to the latest known patch release — e.g. mysql@8.0 → 8.0.46.

The version index is generated offline and shipped with dbpod, so resolution never crawls the web at runtime. When a new patch lands upstream, refresh the local metadata:

dbpod registry update

You can always pin the exact version if you want reproducibility:

dbpod engine install mysql@8.0.46

List

engine ls supports four views:

dbpod engine ls                # installed engines
dbpod engine ls --all          # everything the index knows about
dbpod engine ls --lts          # LTS releases only
dbpod engine ls --series       # grouped by series, latest patch per series

LTS and innovation releases are grouped correctly — for engines that follow calendar versioning, innovation releases are tracked separately from LTS lines, so you can pick a stable baseline or follow the frontier.

Remove

dbpod engine rm mysql@8.0.46

Removing an engine only deletes the cached binaries from the version store. Instances created from it are unaffected until they need to start again — data always lives in the instance’s project-local datadir, never inside the engine cache.

Cross-platform by construction

  • Binaries are built for darwin, linux, and windows; the installer picks the right one.
  • All client-facing commands (exec, project exec) use pure TCP connections, so one engine manifest serves every platform — Windows instances work even though they have no unix socket.

Which engines are available?

mysql and postgres are built in. Further engines (MariaDB, Percona Server, MongoDB, …) come from the dbpod-ext registry — see Registry and Extend.