How to prevent RethinkDB from creating test database

Question

When you launch a rethinkdb instance, it will automatically create a database called 'test'. When you run multiple instances and cluster them using rethinkdb proxy this leads to the issue:

Database name conflict: test is the name of more than one database

If you try to delete the databases i.e using

r.dbDrop('test').run(conn, function(result) {
   console.log(result) // Will result in error
});

This will produce the following error:

ReqlOpFailedError: Database 'test' is ambiguous; there are multiple databases with that name in r.dbDrop("test")

So how to prevent RethinkDB from creating the 'test' database automatically? Or how to remove a database if you run into name conflict?

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 01 '16 at 20:19

1

If you use rethinkdb create to create a data directory, no test database will be created.

For example, if rethinkdb_data doesn't exist, this will create it with no test database:

rethinkdb create
rethinkdb

This will do the same, but uses -d to specify the location of the data directory:

rethinkdb create -d /var/lib/rethinkdb/data
rethinkdb -d /var/lib/rethinkdb/data

answered Nov 01 '16 at 20:19

Etienne Laurin

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For what it's worth, this did not yield the results described--the `test` database was still created. – KyleFarris Aug 09 '18 at 21:24
It worked for me using RethinkDB v2.4.1 – Besworks Apr 30 '22 at 12:14

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 28 '16 at 11:41

After digging for a while I didn't find any good options to prevent RethinkDB from trying to create the default test database on startup. The problem above only occurs when the cluster nodes use different data directories. Otherwise they will not try to create extra test databases as the other nodes will simply recognise it already exists (created by the first node that launched).

I ended up solving this in my backend software by enumerating all database named test during startup from the db_config table in rethinkdb database.

Example:

// Read from the database 'rethinkdb' that holds information about other databases
r.db("rethinkdb")

// Table db_config contains database id, name information
 .table("db_config")

// Filter by name 'test'
 .filter({name: "test"})
 .run(conn, function(err, cursor) {

     // Get results from cursor by id and rename
     cursor.each(function(err, result){
         r.db("rethinkdb")
          .get(result.id)
          .update({name: "other_name"})
          .run(conn, function(err, result) {
              console.log(result.replaced);
           });
     });
});

How to prevent RethinkDB from creating test database

2 Answers2