Nostr-indexer NPM

WARNING: This project is still under heavy development. There are many features still missing and no security audits have been made. Use at your own risk.

🔍 nostr-indexer

An indexer for nostr events that can be installed as an npm package for your backend projects. It can be used as a backbone to build:

Lightweight node for your personal nostr data and social graph.
REST / GraphQL / tRPC backend to power a lightweight client application.
Event notification system.
AI powered content filter (block dic pics)
...?

nostr-indexer abstracts the connections and subscriptions made to relays and provides a simple interface to configure + retrieve data from the indexer. Data is stored in an sqlite database and available to be queried using SQL or built-in functions.

🤷‍♂️ Why?

Almost all nostr clients currently are communicating with relays directly. This can be problematic:

Data you care about is not immediately available, when you open most of the existing apps, data trickles in.
Background syncing is hard to implement in some cases (eg. web / PWAs) and will put a strain on mobile device's battery life, bandwidth and storage.
There is no single source of truth for your data and social graph so your experience on different devices can be inconsistent.
Notifications are harder to implement without relying on third parties.
Developer experience can be simplified if we can fetch data using common patterns like REST, GraphQL, tRPC...

nostr-indexer will be useful for those who want to build something that can take the computational load of sorting their nostr data, is always on and available on a server (locally or remotely).

🚀 Getting Started

1. Installation

yarn add nostr-indexer

2. Setup Database

DATABASE_URL=file:<FULL_PATH_TO_DB_FILE> npx prisma migrate reset --schema ./node_modules/nostr-indexer/prisma/schema.prisma

Substitute <FULL_PATH_TO_DB_FILE> with the full absolute path to your db file, eg. /my-project/nostr.db

3. Usage

Some vanilla javascript code that you can try putting into a index.js and running with DB_PATH=<FULL_PATH_TO_DB_FILE> node index.js

(async () => {
  const nostr = require('nostr-indexer')

  /** @type {import('nostr-indexer').Indexer} */
  // Create the indexer, passing in the path to the database
  const nostrIndexer = nostr.createIndexer({
    dbPath: process.env.DB_PATH,
    // debug: true
  })

  // Add relays
  nostrIndexer.relayManager.addRelay("wss://nostr.fmt.wiz.biz")
  nostrIndexer.relayManager.addRelay("wss://jiggytom.ddns.net")

  // Start
  nostrIndexer.start()

  /** @type {import('nostr-indexer').Account} */
  // Add an account to index
  const account = await nostrIndexer.accountManager.addAccount({
    pubkey: "63c3f814e38f0b5bd64515a063791a0fdfd5b276a31bae4856a16219d8aa0d1f"
  })

  setInterval(async () => {
    // Metadata is logged every second. If any changes get published to one of the relays,
    // the indexer will pick them up and they will be reflected here.
    console.log("Metadata:", await account.getMetadata())
  }, 1000)
})();