Upgrade Guide

This document describes breaking changes and how to upgrade. For a complete list of changes including minor and patch releases, please refer to the changelog.

1.0.0

Introducing rave-level: a fork of level-party that replaces multileveldown and level@7 with many-level and classic-level. The latter could also have been level@8 as that now merely re-exports classic-level. These new modules use the abstract-level interface instead of abstract-leveldown and levelup. For rave-level this means it has the same familiar API including encodings, promises and events but excluding streams. In addition, you can now choose to use Uint8Array instead of Buffer. Sublevels are builtin.

We've put together several upgrade guides for different modules. See the FAQ to find the best upgrade guide for you. This one describes how to replace level-party with rave-level. If you're already familiar with level@8 and classic-level you can skip reading this guide.

Support of Node.js 10 has been dropped.

What's new here

Courtesy of many-level:

• Throughput of iterators has doubled
• Reverse iterators have been fixed to support retry
• Supports iterator.seek() (across retries too).

What is not covered here

If you are using any of the following, please also read the upgrade guide of abstract-level@1 which goes into more detail about these:

• Not-found errors on db.get() (replaced by error codes)
• Sublevels created with subleveldown (now built-in)
• The db.iterator().end() method (renamed to close(), with end() as an alias)
• Zero-length keys and range options (now valid)
• Chained batches (must now be closed if not committed).

Changes to initialization

We started using classes, which means using new is now required. If you previously did:

const level = require('level-party')
const db = level('db')

You must now do:

const { RaveLevel } = require('rave-level')
const db = new RaveLevel('db')

Arguments and options are the same, except that rave-level is explicit about which options it supports. Meaning level-party would implicitly forward some leveldown specific options if it was the leader, while rave-level only takes options that are relevant for both leader and followers. Namely encoding options and retry.

Creating the location recursively

To align behavior between platforms, classic-level and therefore rave-level creates the location directory recursively. While leveldown and therefore level-party would only do so on Windows. In the following example, the foo directory does not have to exist beforehand:

const db = new RaveLevel('foo/bar')

This new behavior may break expectations, given typical filesystem behavior, or it could be a convenient feature, if the database is considered to abstract away the filesystem. We're collecting feedback to determine what to do in a next (major) version. Your vote is most welcome!

Streams have moved

Node.js readable streams must now be created with a new standalone module called level-read-stream rather than database methods like db.createReadStream(). To offer an alternative to db.createKeyStream() and db.createValueStream(), two new types of iterators have been added: db.keys() and db.values().

There is only encodings

Encodings have a new home in abstract-level and are now powered by level-transcoder. The main change is that logic from the existing public API has been expanded down into the storage layer. There are however a few differences from level-party. Some breaking:

• The lesser-used 'id', 'ascii', 'ucs2' and 'utf16le' encodings are not supported
• The undocumented encoding option (as an alias for valueEncoding) is not supported.

And some non-breaking:

• The 'binary' encoding has been renamed to 'buffer', with 'binary' as an alias
• The 'utf8' encoding previously did not touch Buffers. Now it will call buffer.toString('utf8') for consistency. Consumers can use the 'buffer' encoding to avoid this conversion.

Uint8Array data is now supported too, although rave-level internally uses Buffers. It's a separate encoding called 'view' that can be used interchangeably:

const db = new RaveLevel('db', { valueEncoding: 'view' })

await db.put('elena', new Uint8Array([97, 98, 99]))
await db.get('elena') // Uint8Array
await db.get('elena', { valueEncoding: 'utf8' }) // 'abc'
await db.get('elena', { valueEncoding: 'buffer' }) // Buffer

Changes to lesser-used properties and methods

The following properties and methods can no longer be accessed, as they've been removed, renamed or replaced with internal symbols.

Object	Property or method	Original module	New module
iterator	_nexting	abstract-leveldown	abstract-level
iterator	_ended	abstract-leveldown	abstract-level

The following properties are now read-only getters.

Object	Property	Original module	New module
chained batch	length	levelup	abstract-level

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For earlier releases, before rave-level was forked from level-party (v5.1.1), please see the upgrade guide of level-party.