Using Hivemind

Intro

Hive is a “consensus interpretation” layer for the Steem blockchain, maintaining the state of social features such as post feeds, follows, and communities. Written in Python, it synchronizes an SQL database with chain state, providing developers with a more flexible/extensible alternative to the raw steemd API. This means that you can bypass steemd and access data in a more traditional way, for example, with SQL. But you can’t use SQL on steemd. So Hivemind solves that problem. Hive does not support any queries to do with wallets, orders, escrow, keys, recovery, or account history.

A good source of additional information on hive and how to use it can be found in this Steemit article by @inertia.

Supported API functionality:

Core API set available in Hive:

• condenser_api.get_follow_count
• condenser_api.get_followers
• condenser_api.get_following
• condenser_api.get_discussions_by_trending
• condenser_api.get_discussions_by_hot
• condenser_api.get_discussions_by_promoted
• condenser_api.get_discussions_by_created
• condenser_api.get_discussions_by_blog
• condenser_api.get_discussions_by_feed
• condenser_api.get_discussions_by_comments
• condenser_api.get_discussions_by_last_update
• condenser_api.get_content
• condenser_api.get_state

Additional functions available within hive-steem library

The majority of these functions are reliant on steemd so any changes to steemd would affect these function calls. The only two functions not directly reliant on steemd are stream_blocks and get_steem_per_mvest.

• get_accounts
• get_all_account_names
• get_content_batch
• get_block
• stream_blocks
• _gdgp (get dynamic global properties)
• head_time
• head_block
• last_irreversible
• gdgp_extended
• get_steem_per_mvest
• get_feed_price
• get_steem_price
• get_blocks_range

Detailed information on the hive-steem library can be found in the Hivemind repo.

Hivemind dependencies and setup

Hivemind is available as a pre-built docker image which can be downloaded directly from Dockerhub at https://hub.docker.com/r/steemit/hivemind/.

If you would prefer to install Hivemind yourself you can do so following the basic instructions below.

This setup can be performed on an Ubuntu server.

There are two dependencies for setting up the dev environment on ubuntu for running hivemind:

• Python

$ sudo apt-get install python3 python3-pip

• Postgres

$ sudo apt-get install postgresql

More detailed documentation on the setup of Hivemind can be found at the Hivemind github repository.

Once the dependencies have been installed the database can be created and the environment variables set.

$ createdb hive
$ export DATABASE_URL=postgresql://user:pass@localhost:5432/hive

By default Hivemind will connect to the mainnet https://api.steemit.com but if required you can change this to connect to a testnet. To do this set the environment variable as described below.

$ export STEEMD_URL=https://testnet.steem.vc

Now that the basic setup is done you are able to sync the database.

$ hive sync

You can also check the status of your synced database.

$ hive status

Once the synchronization is complete you can start the Hivemind server which will allow you to start performing queries on your local database.

$ hive server

By default the server is available on http://0.0.0.0:8080, this can also be changed by adding an environment variable.

$ export HTTP_SERVER_PORT=8090