Tabularis libSQL / Turso driver

⚠️Work in progress — this plugin is under active development. APIs, behavior and feature coverage may change, and things may break. Use at your own risk.

A Tabularis database driver plugin for libSQL. It connects to:

• Local libSQL / SQLite files on disk (via bundled SQLite — nothing to install), and
• Remote Turso / sqld servers over the Hrana HTTP protocol.

The plugin is a standalone executable that speaks Tabularis' JSON-RPC protocol over stdin/stdout. It is cross-platform (Linux x64/arm64, macOS x64/arm64, Windows x64) and ships those binaries from a single GitHub Actions release workflow.

Connecting

The driver picks a backend from the connection form automatically:

You enter	Backend
A file path in Database (e.g. /data/app.db, ~/notes.db, :memory:)	Local SQLite file
A URL in Database or Host (e.g. libsql://my-db.turso.io)	Remote Hrana HTTP
A bare host in Host (e.g. db.turso.io)	Remote Hrana HTTP (https://)

For Turso, put the auth token in the Password field, or append it to the URL as ?authToken=.... libsql://, wss:// and turso:// URLs are automatically rewritten to https:// (and ws:// to http://) for the Hrana HTTP endpoint. A self-hosted sqld on localhost:8080 uses http:// automatically.

Connection-string import is supported, e.g.:

libsql://my-db.turso.io?authToken=eyJ...

Feature coverage

Area	Status
test_connection, ping	✅
Tables, columns, indexes, foreign keys	✅
Views: list, definition, columns, create/alter/drop	✅
Query execution with server-side LIMIT/OFFSET pagination + total count	✅
EXPLAIN QUERY PLAN	✅
Insert / update / delete rows (bound parameters)	✅
Schema snapshot + batch columns/FKs (ER diagram)	✅
CREATE TABLE SQL, add column, create/drop index	✅
Schemas, stored routines	❌ (not a SQLite concept — Turso has no stored procedures, and its multi-database model is separate databases, not schemas)
Rename column	✅ everywhere (vanilla RENAME COLUMN)
Alter column type / default	✅ everywhere (libSQL ALTER COLUMN extension)
Drop foreign key on existing table	✅ everywhere
Add foreign key to existing table	✅ everywhere (see below)

Identifiers are quoted ANSI-style ("name"). Booleans are stored as 0/1 and BLOBs are returned base64-encoded.

Schema changes via ALTER COLUMN

Both local files and remote Turso / sqld servers run the libSQL fork of SQLite, which adds ALTER TABLE ... ALTER COLUMN col TO col <type> [DEFAULT ...] [REFERENCES ...]. The plugin uses it to:

• change a column's type (and optionally its DEFAULT / NOT NULL),
• add or drop a foreign key on an existing column (the same statement with or without the REFERENCES clause).

The get_create_foreign_key_sql builder always receives connection params from the host, and get_alter_column_sql does too when the host provides them, so the plugin introspects the column's declared type and constraints (NOT NULL, DEFAULT, REFERENCES) and reproduces them in the rewrite — altering a column does not silently strip its foreign key or default. Note that libSQL applies constraint changes to newly inserted/updated rows only — existing rows are not rewritten or revalidated — and foreign key enforcement requires PRAGMA foreign_keys=ON.

Composite (multi-column) foreign keys cannot be dropped: the fork only rewrites per-column definitions, so drop_foreign_key reports a clear error instead of silently doing nothing.

Build & test

Requires a Rust toolchain (and a C compiler for the bundled SQLite).

just test# cargo test — unit tests for SQL builders, parsing, RPC
just build # debug build
just release # optimized release build
just lint # clippy -D warnings
just dev-install # build + copy binary + manifest into the Tabularis plugins dir
just repl # local JSON-RPC REPL over stdio

Or directly with cargo:

cargo test
cargo build --release

Manual JSON-RPC smoke test

echo'{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"get_tables","params":{"params":{"database":"/tmp/app.db"},"schema":null},"id":1}' \
| ./target/debug/libsql-plugin

Installing

just dev-install copies libsql-plugin and .tabularium into the Tabularis plugins folder (the location Tabularis actually scans — derived from ProjectDirs::from("com", "debba", "tabularis")):

• Linux:~/.local/share/tabularis/plugins/libsql/
• macOS:~/Library/Application Support/tabularis/plugins/libsql/
• Windows:%APPDATA%\tabularis\plugins\libsql\

Restart Tabularis (or toggle the plugin in Settings) and libSQL appears in the Database Type list.

Architecture

src/
├── main.rs # stdio JSON-RPC loop
├── rpc.rs # method routing + response helpers
├── client.rs # backend resolution (local vs remote) + unified query/execute
├── hrana.rs # Hrana-over-HTTP pipeline client (remote)
├── models.rs # ConnectionParams
├── error.rs # PluginError
├── handlers/ # metadata / query / crud / ddl
└── utils/ # identifiers, pagination, SQL classification, value conversion

Local files use the embedded libSQL fork of SQLite (bundled — nothing to install). Remote connections use a small synchronous ureq client (pure-Rust rustls TLS) speaking the stateless Hrana /v2/pipeline endpoint, so the same query/execute surface serves both backends with no async runtime.

License

Apache-2.0