Using an embedded instance

Setup

Build surrealdb.c and set up CGO
Run the command go get github.com/surrealdb/surrealdb.c.go
Write code to connect to an embedded instance of SurrealDB.

Note

New to CGO? This module links against a C static library (libsurrealdb_c.a) at compile time. You must build surrealdb.c and set CGO_LDFLAGS to its location before go build or go test will work. Without this, the Go linker cannot find the SurrealDB symbols and the build will fail. See docs/build.md for step-by-step instructions — or use the provided Makefile which handles everything automatically (make build).

The following code shows a simple example that opens up an embedded instance in memory, defines a table and then creates and selects a person record that matches the Person struct that the output deserializes into.

package main

import (
    "context"
    "fmt"
    "log"

    surrealdb "github.com/surrealdb/surrealdb.c.go"
)

type Person struct {
    ID   surrealdb.RecordID[string] `cbor:"id,omitempty"`
    Name string                     `cbor:"name"`
    Age  int64                      `cbor:"age"`
}

func main() {
    ctx := context.Background()

    db, err := surrealdb.Open(ctx, "mem://")
    if err != nil {
        log.Fatal(err)
    }
    defer db.Close()

    db.Use(ctx, "test", "test")
    db.Query(ctx, "DEFINE TABLE person SCHEMALESS", nil)
    db.Query(ctx, "CREATE $rid CONTENT $content", map[string]any{
        "rid":     surrealdb.NewRecordID("person", "alice"),
        "content": Person{Name: "Alice", Age: 30},
    })

    results, _ := surrealdb.Query[Person](ctx, db, "SELECT * FROM person", nil)
    for _, p := range results[0].Values() {
        fmt.Printf("%s: %s (age %d)\n", p.ID, p.Name, p.Age)
    }
}

More information

For more information on the Go bindings used for an embedded SurrealDB instance, see this page for the surrealdb.c.go repo.

Pages of particular note are:

Storage backends: how to use other endpoints like rocksdb://.
Linking strategy