Quick Start

Lightweight SQLite WAL sync to S3 in Rust.

Why Walrust?

Walrust is a SQLite replication tool optimized to use less memory than Litestream:

Databases	walrust	Litestream	Reduction
1	19 MB	36 MB	47%
10	19 MB	55 MB	65%
100	20 MB	160 MB	88%

Walrust’s memory remains ~19-20 MB regardless of database count.

Implementation

Written in Rust with async/await (tokio)
No CGO dependencies
~8 MB binary size

See Why Walrust? for detailed comparisons and use cases.

Installation

CLI (Rust)

cargo install walrust

Python

pip install walrust

Verify

walrust --version

Set Up Credentials

Configure your S3 credentials. Example for Tigris (Fly.io):

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=tid_xxxxx
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=tsec_xxxxx
export AWS_ENDPOINT_URL_S3=https://fly.storage.tigris.dev

See S3 Providers for AWS, R2, MinIO, and other providers.

Take a Snapshot

Back up your database to S3:

walrust snapshot myapp.db --bucket my-backups

Output:

Snapshotting myapp.db to s3://my-backups/myapp.db/...
✓ Snapshot complete (1.2 MB, 445ms)
  Checksum: a3f2b9c8d4e5f6a7...

Watch for Changes

Continuously sync WAL changes:

walrust watch myapp.db --bucket my-backups

This watches for database changes and syncs them to S3. Run this as a background service in production.

Restore

Restore a database from backup:

walrust restore myapp.db --bucket my-backups -o restored.db

Output:

Restoring myapp.db from s3://my-backups/...
  Downloading snapshot... done (1.2 MB)
  Verifying checksum... ✓
✓ Restored to restored.db

Watch Multiple Databases

Sync multiple databases with a single process:

walrust watch app.db users.db analytics.db --bucket my-backups

Create a Read Replica

Run a local read replica that polls S3 for changes:

walrust replicate s3://my-backups/myapp.db --local replica.db --interval 5s

Output:

Replicating s3://my-backups/myapp.db -> replica.db
Poll interval: 5s
Press Ctrl+C to stop

Bootstrapped from snapshot: 1024 pages, TXID 100
[10:30:05] Applied 1 LTX file(s), now at TXID 101

The replica auto-bootstraps from the latest snapshot if it doesn’t exist, then applies incremental updates.

Next Steps

Why Walrust? - Multi-tenant SQLite use case
CLI Reference - Full command documentation (including replicate)
Configuration - Environment variables and options
Deployment - systemd, Docker, Kubernetes guides