Hey everyone! 👋

After years of making CLI tools and small Node.js scripts, I kept running into the same problem:

“How do I reliably store local data without spinning up a full database engine?”

Most of the existing JSON databases for Node.js are either:

• too simple (no crash protection)
• too slow
• or completely skip important features like WAL or fsync

🧠 So I built WiseJSON

A reliable, segment-based embedded JSON database for Node.js.

With full support for:

✅ WAL (Write-Ahead Logging)

✅ Checkpoints (segment-based, fast recovery)

✅ fsync for safety

✅ In-memory indexes (including unique ones)

✅ CLI support

✅ Zero dependencies except uuid

✅ pkg-friendly (can be bundled into binaries)

🔧 What makes WiseJSON different?

• Everything is stored in the filesystem — no daemon, no server
• You can use it in CLI apps, scripts, microservices
• Recovery is safe even after crashes or power loss
• Checkpoints are written in segments to keep things scalable

🚀 Install & Use

npm install wise-json-db

npx wise-json insert users name=Alice email=alice@example.com
npx wise-json list users

Example .js usage:

const WiseJSON = require('wise-json-db');

const db = new WiseJSON('./my-db');

(async () => {
  const users = await db.collection('users');
  await users.createIndex('email', { unique: true });

  const user = await users.insert({ name: 'Alice', email: 'alice@example.com' });
  console.log(user._id);

  await db.close();
})();

💬 Why I’m proud of this project

This is honestly the first open source project I’ve built where I took the time to get everything right:

• Proper fsync safety
• WAL + segmented checkpoint logic
• Clean CLI
• Real-world tests (including crash tests and stress tests)
• Full documentation and even a logo

It’s not the fastest database — and it’s not meant to be.

It’s built to be safe, predictable, and easy to reason about.

🧪 What’s tested

• Thousands of WAL writes under fsync
• Segment splitting with small limits
• Recovery after crash or deletion
• Manual flush and checkpointing
• Segment-level file validation

You can find all test scripts under /test in the GitHub repo.

🔗 Links

• GitHub: github.com/Xzdes/WiseJSON
• npm: wise-json-db

🙏 I’d love feedback — or just a star if you like the idea.

Thanks for reading!