January 19, 2025
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A quick start guide to get you up and running with Couchbase and the Ruby SDK.

The Couchbase Ruby SDK allows you to connect to a Couchbase cluster from Ruby. The Ruby SDK includes high-performance native Ruby extensions to handle communicating to the cluster over Couchbase’s binary protocols.

Ruby SDK supports currently maintained Ruby versions, and recommends the latest stable version where possible (currently 3.3 as of March 2024).

In this guide, you will learn:

Hello Couchbase

We will go through the code sample step by step, but for those in a hurry to see it, here it is:

If you are connecting to Couchbase Capella, be sure to get the correct endpoint as well as user, password — and see the Cloud section, below.

require "couchbase"

# Update these credentials for your Capella instance!
options = Cluster::Options::Cluster.new
options.authenticate("username", "Password!123")

# Sets a pre-configured profile called "wan-development" to help avoid latency issues
# when accessing Capella from a different Wide Area Network
# or Availability Zone (e.g. your laptop).
options.apply_profile("wan_development")

cluster = Cluster.connect("couchbases://cb.<your-endpoint>.cloud.couchbase.com", options)

# get a bucket reference
bucket = cluster.bucket("travel-sample")

# get a user-defined collection reference
scope = bucket.scope("tenant_agent_00")
collection = scope.collection("users")

# Upsert Document
upsert_result = collection.upsert(
  "my-document-key",
  {
    "name" => "Ted",
    "age" => 31
  }
)
p cas: upsert_result.cas
#=> {:cas=>223322674373654}

# Get Document
get_result = collection.get("my-document-key")
p cas: get_result.cas,
  name: get_result.content["name"]
#=> {:cas=>223322674373654, :name=>"Ted"}

inventory_scope = bucket.scope("inventory")
result = inventory_scope.query('SELECT * FROM airline WHERE id = 10;')
result.rows.each do |row|
  p row
end

cluster.disconnect

The Couchbase Capella free tier version comes with the Travel Sample Bucket, and its Query indexes, loaded and ready.

Quick Installation

The source package is available through https://rubygems.org/gems/couchbase and can be installed with

console
gem install couchbase

In addition to rubygems.org, we also maintain official gem repositories, where we publish not only source version of the package, but also precompiled binaries for Linux and MacOS.

Prerequisites

The following code samples assume:

  • You have signed up to Couchbase Capella.

  • You have created your own bucket, or loaded the Travel Sample dataset. Note, the Travel Sample dataset is installed automatically when deploying a Capella free tier cluster.

  • A user is created with permissions to access the cluster (at least Application Access permissions). See the Capella connection page for more details.

Couchbase Capella uses Roles to control user access to cluster resources. For the purposes of this guide, you can use the Organization Owner role automatically assigned to your account during installation of the Capella cluster. In a production scenario, we strongly recommend setting up users with more granular access roles as a best practice.

Step-by-step

Start a new project (in VS Code or RubyMine, etc.) and create a file cb-test.rb.

Firstly, you will need to have require statement at the top of your Ruby program:

require "couchbase"

Connect

Connect to your cluster by calling the Cluster.connect() method and pass it your connection details. The basic connection details that you’ll need are given below — for more background information, see Managing Connections.

From version 3.3, the Ruby SDK includes Capella’s standard certificates by default, so you do not need to additional configuration. You do need to enable TLS, which can be done by simply using couchbases:// in the connection string as in this example.

# Update these credentials for your Capella instance!
options = Cluster::Options::Cluster.new
options.authenticate("username", "Password!123")

# Sets a pre-configured profile called "wan-development" to help avoid latency issues
# when accessing Capella from a different Wide Area Network
# or Availability Zone (e.g. your laptop).
options.apply_profile("wan_development")

cluster = Cluster.connect("couchbases://cb.<your-endpoint>.cloud.couchbase.com", options)

When accessing Capella from a different Wide Area Network or Availability Zone, you may experience latency issues with the default connection settings. SDK 3.4 introduces a wan_development Configuration Profile, which provides pre-configured timeout settings suitable for working in high latency environments. Basic usage is shown in the example above, but if you want to learn more see Constrained Network Environments.

The Configuration Profiles feature is currently a Volatile API and may be subject to change.

Following successful authentication, add this code snippet to access your Bucket:

# get a bucket reference
bucket = cluster.bucket("travel-sample")

Add and Retrieve Documents

Collections allow Documents to be grouped by purpose or theme, according to specified Scope. Our Travel Sample bucket has separate scopes for inventory (flights, etc.), and for tenants (different travel agents).

Here we refer to the users collection within the tenant_agent_00 scope from the Travel Sample bucket as an example, but you may replace this with your own data.

# get a user-defined collection reference
scope = bucket.scope("tenant_agent_00")
collection = scope.collection("users")

Data operations, like storing and retrieving documents, can be done using simple methods on the Collection class such as Collection.get() and Collection.upsert().

To get you started the following code creates a new document in a custom scope and collection and then fetches it again, printing the result.

# Upsert Document
upsert_result = collection.upsert(
  "my-document-key",
  {
    "name" => "Ted",
    "age" => 31
  }
)
p cas: upsert_result.cas
#=> {:cas=>223322674373654}

# Get Document
get_result = collection.get("my-document-key")
p cas: get_result.cas,
  name: get_result.content["name"]
#=> {:cas=>223322674373654, :name=>"Ted"}

SQL++ Lookup

Couchbase SQL++ queries can be performed at the Cluster or Scope level by invoking Cluster.query() or Scope.query().

Cluster level queries require you to specify the fully qualified keyspace each time (e.g. travel-sample.inventory.airline). However, with a Scope level query you only need to specify the Collection name — which in this case is airline:

inventory_scope = bucket.scope("inventory")
result = inventory_scope.query('SELECT * FROM airline WHERE id = 10;')
result.rows.each do |row|
  p row
end

You can learn more about SQL++ queries on the Query page.

After completing operations, finish with (otherwise resources will be released by garbage collector):

cluster.disconnect

Next Steps

Now you’re up and running, try one of the following:

Additional Resources

The API reference is generated for each release and can be found here. Older API references are linked from their respective sections in the Release Notes.

Couchbase welcomes community contributions to the Ruby SDK. The Ruby SDK source code is available on GitHub.

Troubleshooting