Persistence

When you build an app, you want to be able to save that user's data somewhere, likely locally first and then remotely on a Cloud server, raspberry pi, mobile phone, or other device.

Automerge is an in-memory data structure library. It does not perform any I/O, neither disk access nor network communication. Automerge includes general-purpose building blocks for network protocols, but you need to use a separate library to perform the actual communication (including encryption, authentication, and access control). Similarly, disk persistence needs to happen in a separate layer outside of Automerge.

Strategies

There are two ways you can store documents:

• as a log of changes: after every change you make, call Automerge.getLastLocalChange(doc) and store the byte array that is returned; to load the document, pass all those byte arrays to Automerge.applyChanges()
• as a whole document: use Automerge.save(doc) to encode the whole document as a byte array; store that on the server; and use Automerge.load() to load it again.

Storing one change at a time is good for small updates to a document, since it will be more compact than storing the whole document over and over again. But storing the whole document will be more compact (and faster) than storing the whole log of changes since the document was created. This can be tested and fine-tuned based on the number of changes you're saving at any one given time. If you're saving hundreds of changes, it is probably more efficienty to simply write the whole document to disk using Automerge.save(doc). If you have a long history and only want to sync one change, then using getLastLocalChange will be more efficient.

Automerge Binary Files

Automerge's binary format is very efficient, and uses the same data representation in memory as on disk. In general, storing any data you get from the network into the local filesystem, and loading documents from the filesystem first will improve the perceived performance of your program.

Automerge.save(doc) serializes the state of Automerge document doc to a byte array (Uint8Array), which you can write to disk (e.g. as a file on the filesystem if you're using Node.js, or to IndexedDB if you're running in a browser). The serialized data contains the full change history of the document (a bit like a Git repository).

Automerge.load(byteArray) unserializes an Automerge document from a byte array that was produced by Automerge.save().

Note: Specifying actorId

The Automerge init and load functions take an optional actorId parameter:

const actorId = '1234-abcd-56789-qrstuv'
const doc1 = Automerge.init(actorId)
const doc3 = Automerge.load(str, actorId)

The actorId is a string that uniquely identifies the current node; if you omit actorId, a random UUID is generated. If you pass in your own actorId, you must ensure that there can never be two different processes with the same actor ID. Even if you have two different processes running on the same machine, they must have distinct actor IDs.

Unless you know what you are doing, you should stick with the default, and let actorId be auto-generated.

To get the actorId of the current node, call Automerge.getActorId(doc).