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Instances

Let’s get to the good stuff. You can spin up an EdgeDB instance with a single command.

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$ 
edgedb instance create my_instance

This creates a new instance named my_instance that runs the latest stable version of EdgeDB. (EdgeDB itself will be automatically installed if it isn’t already.) Alternatively you can specify a specific version with --version.

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$ 
edgedb instance create my_instance --version 2.1
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$ 
edgedb instance create my_instance --version nightly

We can execute a query against our new instance with edgedb query. Specify which instance to connect to by passing an instance name into the -I flag.

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$ 
edgedb query "select 3.14" -I my_instance
3.14

A single EdgeDB instance can contain multiple databases. Upon creation, an instance contains a single database called edgedb. All queries and CLI commands are executed against this database unless otherwise specified.

To create a new database:

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$ 
edgedb database create newdb -I my_instance

We can now execute queries against this new database by specifying it with the --database/-d flag.

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$ 
edgedb query "select 3.14" -I my_instance -d newdb
3.14

Instances can be stopped, started, restarted, and destroyed.

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$ 
edgedb instance stop -I my_instance
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$ 
edgedb instance start -I my_instance
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$ 
edgedb instance restart -I my_instance
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$ 
edgedb instance destroy -I my_instance

To list all instances on your machine:

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$ 
edgedb instance list
┌────────┬──────────────────┬──────────┬────────────────┬──────────┐
│ Kind   │ Name             │ Port     │ Version        │ Status   │
├────────┼──────────────────┼──────────┼────────────────┼──────────┤
│ local  │ my_instance      │ 10700    │ 2.x+8421216    │ active   │
│ local  │ my_instance_2    │ 10701    │ 2.x+8421216    │ active   │
│ local  │ my_instance_3    │ 10702    │ 2.x+8421216    │ active   │
└────────┴──────────────────┴──────────┴────────────────┴──────────┘

For complete documentation on managing instances with the CLI (upgrading, viewing logs, etc.), refer to the edgedb instance reference or view the help text in your shell:

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$ 
edgedb instance --help
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