Documentation & Guides

Welcome to drift's documentation. This site shows you what drift can do and how to use it.

Welcome to drift

Drift is a reactive persistence library for Dart and Flutter applications. It's built on top of database libraries like the sqlite3 package, sqflite or sql.js and provides additional features, like:

  • Type safety: Instead of writing sql queries manually and parsing the List<Map<String, dynamic>> that they return, drift turns rows into objects of your choice.
  • Stream queries: Drift lets you "watch" your queries with zero additional effort. Any query can be turned into an auto-updating stream that emits new items when the underlying data changes.
  • Fluent queries: Drift generates a Dart api that you can use to write queries and automatically get their results. Keep an updated list of all users with select(users).watch(). That's it! No sql to write, no rows to parse.
  • Typesafe sql: If you prefer to write sql, that's fine! Drift has an sql parser and analyzer built in. It can parse your queries at compile time, figure out what columns they're going to return and generate Dart code to represent your rows.
  • Migration utils: Drift makes writing migrations easier thanks to utility functions like .createAllTables(). You don't need to manually write your CREATE TABLE statements and keep them updated.

And much more! Drift validates data before inserting it, so you can get helpful error messages instead of just an sql error code. Of course, it supports transactions. And DAOs. And efficient batched insert statements. The list goes on.

Check out these in-depth articles to learn about drift and how to use its features.


Getting started

Simple guide to get a drift project up and running

Examples

Example apps using drift

Advanced Features

Learn about some advanced features of drift

Using SQL

Write typesafe sql with drift

Transactions

Run multiple statements atomically

Other engines

Use drift on the web or other platforms

Drift internals

Work in progress documentation on drift internals

Command line tools for drift

A set of CLI tools to interact with drift projects

Upgrading

How to upgrade between major drift versions

Supported platforms

All platforms supported by drift, and how to use them

Frequently asked questions
Community

Packages contributed by the community

Testing

Guide on writing unit tests for drift databases