Database Providers

Database is an integral part of any application. DOM Cloud provides a free, opt-in OS-Wide MariaDB 10.11, PostgreSQL 17.4 and Valkey 8.0 databases available for every website in every tier.

Initializing Databases

Databases are opt-in, disabled by default. To enable it, go to deploy tab and execute one of these:

features:
- mysql

features:
- postgresql

features:
- redis

See the section in MariaDB or PostgreSQL or Valkey for more information.

To view and edit the database using online tools, use PhpMyAdmin, PhpPgAdmin or PhpRedisAdmin. All of them are available from the manage tab.

Managing Databases

You can manage databases in Setup -> Database. The entries below is the list of databases name that has been created.

Note that you cannot create or drop database with PhpMyAdmin, PhpPgAdmin, phpRedisAdmin or with any external database client. You can only to do it either from here, the Webmin UI or in the deployment script.

MariaDB

MariaDB is the fork of MySQL database. Here's how you connect it from the application in the server:

MARIADB_HOST=localhost
MARIADB_PORT=3306
MARIADB_NAME=<database name>
MARIADB_USER=<username login>
MARIADB_PASS=<password login>

The username and password login can be seen from manage tab. The database name is tipically username + _db but you check the database name from managing database.

To connect the database with remote client, set the MARIADB_HOST as the server name, which also can be seen from manage tab. You can also use PhpMyAdmin or mariadb CLI from SSH to manage it.

caution

Username and password is always different from the default. Don't assume root username with empty password will work for you.

Notable Differences of MariaDB and MySQL

Here's non exhaustive list of the differences:

• MariaDB have UUID while MySQL not. In Laravel 11, setting the database engine to mariadb will pick up the UUID as the native type for UUID.
• MariaDB doesn't support lateral join at this moment.

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL is the most complete RDBMS. Here's how you connect it from the application in the server:

POSTGRES_HOST=localhost
POSTGRES_PORT=5432
POSTGRES_NAME=<database name>
POSTGRES_USER=<username login>
POSTGRES_PASS=<password login>

The username and password login can be seen from manage tab. The database name is tipically username + _db but you check the database name from managing database.

To connect the database with remote client, set the POSTGRES_HOST as the server name, which also can be seen from manage tab. You can also use PhpPgAdmin or psql CLI from SSH to manage it.

Supported PostgreSQL Extensions

These optional PostgreSQL extensions can be activated using CREATE EXTENSION clause on a given database:

Extension Name	Description	Link
btree_gin	Provides support for GIN (Generalized Inverted Index) indexing for B-tree data types.	Documentation
btree_gist	Provides support for GiST (Generalized Search Tree) indexing for B-tree data types.	Documentation
citext	A case-insensitive text data type extension.	Documentation
cube	Provides data types and functions to support multidimensional cubes.	Documentation
dict_int	Provides an example dictionary template for integers.	Documentation
earthdistance	Provides functions for calculating great-circle distances between points on the Earth's surface.	Documentation
fuzzystrmatch	Provides functions to perform "fuzzy" string matching, including soundex and levenshtein distance.	Documentation
hstore	A key-value store within PostgreSQL, allowing you to store sets of key/value pairs within a single PostgreSQL value.	Documentation
intarray	Provides support for indexed arrays of integers.	Documentation
isn	Provides data types for various international standard numbers, such as ISBN, ISMN, and ISSN.	Documentation
lo	Provides support for large objects within PostgreSQL.	Documentation
ltree	Provides a data type for representing labels of data stored in a hierarchical tree-like structure.	Documentation
pgcrypto	Provides cryptographic functions for PostgreSQL, including encryption, decryption, hashing, and more.	Documentation
pg_trgm	Provides functions and operators for determining the similarity of text based on trigram matching.	Documentation
plpgsql	PostgreSQL's procedural language for SQL, allowing for control structures, complex calculations, and error handling in SQL scripts.	Documentation
seg	Provides a "seg" data type for representing line segments in two-dimensional space.	Documentation
tablefunc	Provides functions for manipulating tables, such as crosstab functions.	Documentation
tcn	Provides support for Triggered Change Notification, allowing for notification of changes in the database.	Documentation
tsm_system_rows	A table sampling method that returns a specified number of rows.	Documentation
tsm_system_time	A table sampling method that returns rows from a table based on the system time.	Documentation
unaccent	Provides a dictionary and function to remove accents (diacritics) from strings.	Documentation
uuid-ossp	Provides functions to generate universally unique identifiers (UUIDs).	Documentation
pg_uuidv7	Provides support for UUID version 7, a new type of universally unique identifier.	Documentation
postgis	A spatial database extender for PostgreSQL, providing support for geographic objects.	Documentation
postgis_raster	Extends PostGIS with raster data support, allowing the storage, query, and analysis of raster data types.	Documentation
postgis_sfcgal	Extends PostGIS with advanced 3D capabilities provided by the SFCGAL library.	Documentation
postgis_tiger_geocoders	Provides geocoding functions using the U.S. Census TIGER/Line data.	Documentation
postgis_topology	Extends PostGIS with topology support, allowing the representation of topological structures.	Documentation
address_standardizer	Standardizes address data for geocoding purposes.	Documentation
address_standardizer_data_us	Provides US address data for the address standardizer extension.	Documentation
pgrouting	Extends PostGIS with geospatial routing functionality.	Documentation
timescaledb	An extension that provides scalable time-series data management built on PostgreSQL.	Documentation
vector	A vector data type extension, useful for implementing machine learning models and similar functionalities.	Documentation

Valkey

Valkey is a fork of Redis. Here's how you connect it from the application in the server:

REDIS_HOST=localhost
REDIS_PORT=6379
REDIS_KEY_PREFIX=<database name>:
REDIS_USER=<database name>
REDIS_PASS=<database password>

The REDIS_KEY_PREFIX and REDIS_USER is the ACL rules that your application must follow, as the Redis server is shared for whole server. Get the <database name> and <database password> from manage databases.

Here's how to connect to Valkey for applications who do not support Redis ACL username and prefixed keys:

REDIS_HOST=localhost
REDIS_PORT=6479
REDIS_PASS=<database name>:::<database password>

The port 6479 signifies that you're connecting to ACL Proxy for Valkey.

We do not support remote connection to Redis at this moment. Please use PhpRedisAdmin or valkey-cli to manage it.

Valkey ACL Rules

The Valkey instance set up at port 6379 is shared across the server. To protect user data, we set up an ACL authentication to each "database" instance. Given a "database" name is user_db, the ACL rules applied are:

user_db on >${password} ~user_db:* &user_db:* sanitize-payload
  -@all +@connection +@read +@write +@scripting +@keyspace -KEYS
  +@transaction +@geo +@hash +@set +@sortedset +@bitmap +@pubsub
  +config|get +info +acl|whoami +acl|cat +acl|genpass

Most software or framework should work with this ACL rules, however not application would support key prefixing as implied in ~user_db:* &user_db:*. To avoid code changes we recommend you to use port 6479 which is another daemon that can aid with automatic key prefixing to the master valkey instance.

ACL Proxy for Valkey

DOM Cloud set up an ACL proxy for valkey that listening on port 6479. It's mirrorring connections to 6379 with these enhancements:

• Automatically prefixes keys or read/write operations such as SCAN, GET, SET and so much more, to allow access any keys without having to prefix it with user_db: (where user_db is the ACL username).
• Automatically removes prefix of user_db: with results from SCAN so the clients doesn't need to adjust with automatic key prefixing.
• Support old requirepass login model with username:::password syntax in the password. This is meant for frameworks that doesn't handle Redis 6.0 ACL yet.

Note that the proxy is experimental. Some modern features (like HELLO 3) won't work and some Lua scripting may not work if it written badly. See the repository for details.

To connect to this proxy with redis-cli, use redis-cli -u username_db:::password -p 6479. PhpRedisAdmin is also configured to work on 6479 rather than directly with the master valkey instance at 6379. Note that the redis-cli is a symlink to valkey-cli.

Timestamp

Our server always sets the clock in UTC.

A good idea to handle timezone is done by client processing (Javascript), both after getting the data from database/AJAX and before sending data/Posts to server.

If you don't care about timezone and you think it's safe to assume that your website is only accessed in one timezone, you can set the timezone in the backend using date_default_timezone_set for PHP or TZ env for non-PHP (set it to passenger's env_var_list).

Other Database System

Only four database system is supported: MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Valkey, SQLite. For caching we recommend you to leverage Valkey or the filesystem.

You can also use third party databases that's also cheap (or even free) such as Firebase Firestore or MongoDB Atlas, just make sure the cluster is close enough within our server.

If you wish to spin up a custom database server, you might be better deploy your website using docker.