TypeScript client

The client is defined in packages/typescript-client. It provides ShapeStream and Shape primitives to stream and materialize shapes.

Use cases

Real-time Postgres sync for modern apps.

Electric provides an HTTP interface to Postgres to enable a massive number of clients to query and get real-time updates to subsets of the database, called Shapes. In this way, Electric turns Postgres into a real-time database.

The TypeScript client helps ease reading Shapes from the HTTP API in the browser and other JavaScript environments, like edge functions and server-side JavaScript applications. It supports both fine-grained and coarse-grained reactivity patterns — you can subscribe to see every row that changes, or you can just subscribe to get the whole shape whenever it changes.

Install

The client is published on NPM as @electric-sql/client:

npm i @electric-sql/client

How to use

The client exports a ShapeStream class for getting updates to shapes on a row-by-row basis as well as a Shape class for getting updates to the entire shape.

ShapeStream

import { ShapeStream } from '@electric-sql/client'

// Passes subscribers rows as they're inserted, updated, or deleted
const stream = new ShapeStream({
  url: `http://localhost:3000/v1/shape/foo`,
})

stream.subscribe(messages => {
  // messages is an array with one or more row updates
})

By default, ShapeStream parses the following Postgres types into native JavaScript values:

• int2, int4, float4, and float8 are parsed into JavaScript Number
• int8 is parsed into a JavaScript BigInt
• bool is parsed into a JavaScript Boolean
• json and jsonb are parsed into JavaScript values/arrays/objects using JSON.parse
• Postgres Arrays are parsed into JavaScript arrays, e.g. "{{1,2},{3,4}}" is parsed into [[1,2],[3,4]]

All other types aren't parsed and are left in the string format as they were served by the HTTP endpoint.

The ShapeStream can be configured with a custom parser that is an object mapping Postgres types to parsing functions for those types. For example, we can extend the default parser to parse booleans into 1 or 0 instead of true or false:

const stream = new ShapeStream({
  url: `http://localhost:3000/v1/shape/foo`,
  parser: {
    bool: (value: string) => value === `true` ? 1 : 0
  }
})

Shape

import { ShapeStream, Shape } from '@electric-sql/client'

const stream = new ShapeStream({
  url: `http://localhost:3000/v1/shape/foo`,
})
const shape = new Shape(stream)

// Returns promise that resolves with the latest shape data once it's fully loaded
await shape.value

// passes subscribers shape data when the shape updates
shape.subscribe(shapeData => {
  // shapeData is a Map of the latest value of each row in a shape.
})

See the Examples and integrations for more usage examples.