How to work directly with postgres db from the cli in Grist Electron?

[ReedyBear]

I just want to use the postgres cli to access & manipulate my data, but I can't figure out how to connect to it. I don't currently have postgres installed on my system, so I assume it is stored on-disk somewhere in user storage.

I found the grist files at ~/.config/grist-electron/ and a file ~/Documents/[random_chars].grist on linux Fedora.

I can't find the postgres db though & I didn't see an answer at https://support.getgrist.com/self-managed/#what-files-does-grist-store

[paulfitz]

Hi @ReedyBear, if you haven't explicitly configured Grist to use postgres, then it is using sqlite. For Grist electron, I think the file is called landing.db and looks to be stored wherever path.resolve(electron.app.getPath('appData'), 'landing.db') would be.

[ReedyBear]

@paulfitz, thanks! When I looked at sqlite3 ~/Documents/[random_chars].grist, I overlooked my actual tables, but they're in there. I was curious about syncing my grist db with a mysql db, so needed raw access. Probably going with a different solution that works seamlessly with MySql (like NocoDb), even though Grist seems to be the best UX of options I've looked at.

For reference, here's how things got setup by default on my Fedora system using grist-electron's AppImage:

• ~/.config/grist-electron/ contains what appears to be grist internal files
• ~/.config/landing.db appears to be for grist internal use
• ~/Documents/[random_chars].grist is an sqlite3 database containing MY data, plus a bunch of extra grist tables.
• ~/.grist/plugins does not exist, but grist attempts to load plugins from it
• ~/.config/grist-electron/config.json does not exist, but grist attempts to load it.

Running the AppImage from the cli was helpful, in order to see some file paths in the logs.

[paulfitz]

Thanks for the feedback on what you learned @ReedyBear. Agree that for working directly with MySQL, Grist is not the tool to go with today.