Getting Started with Apibara

Apibara is the easiest way to build production-grade indexers:

• Stream onchain data into your indexer, receiving exactly the data you need.
• Transform the data into a higher-level representation that maps to your application domain.
• Integrate data with the rest of your application by sending it to other services.

                                Transform
┌──────────────┐             ┌──────────────┐              ┌──────────────┐
│              │░            │              │░             │              │░
│     DNA      │░  Stream    │   Indexer    │░ Integrate   │    Target    │░
│    Server    │────────────▶│    Script    │─────────────▶│ Integration  │░
│              │░            │              │░             │              │░
└──────────────┘░            └──────────────┘░             └──────────────┘░
 ░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░             ░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░              ░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░

This page will guide you in setting up your development environment for Apibara and writing your first indexer.

Install the apibara CLI by running the following command. Note that you need jq install for this to work. Alternatively, you can download the CLI from our release page and manually add it to your $PATH.

curl -sL https://install.apibara.com | bash

After this, create a new terminal and check that apibara is installed:

apibara --version

apibara-cli 0.4.0

If the command above prints apibara: command not found it means that the Apibara directory is not in $PATH. To fix it, make sure that the Apibara directory is in $PATH, the directory is system-dependent and is printed during the installation phase.

Apibara doesn't include any integration out of the box. Integrations are a special type of plugin and are managed using the CLI.

List the installed plugins using the following command. Note that, as expected, no plugin is installed.

apibara plugins list

We use the apibara plugins install command to download and install plugins from GitHub.

For this tutorial, we install the "console" plugin since it requires no external dependency or service.

apibara plugins install sink-console

Found release Console Sink v0.1.0
Downloading sink-console-x86_64-linux.gz...
Plugin console installed to /home/user/.local/share/apibara/plugins/apibara-sink-console

Now we can list the plugins again to check that the plugin was installed correctly.

apibara plugins list

╭─────────┬──────┬─────────╮
│ NAME    │ KIND │ VERSION │
├─────────┼──────┼─────────┤
│ console │ sink │ 0.4.1   │
╰─────────┴──────┴─────────╯

Head over to the registration page to create an Apibara account.

From your dashboard, click on the "New Indexer" button and then select "DNA Key". Choose a memorable name for your API Key and then click "Deploy Indexer".

Finally, copy the API Key to your clipboard. Notice that you can come back to this page at any time from your dashboard.

As we will see in the next section, you will need the API Key to authenticate with the data streams hosted by Apibara.

Indexers are implemented as Javascript or Typescript scripts. Scripts need to export at least two things:

• a config object that contains the indexer configuration.
• a default function, used to transform each batch of data streamed by Apibara.

A minimal script looks like the following:

export const config = {
  streamUrl: "https://sepolia.starknet.a5a.ch",
  startingBlock: 10_000,
  network: "starknet",
  finality: "DATA_STATUS_ACCEPTED",
  filter: {
    header: {},
  },
  sinkType: "console",
  sinkOptions: {},
};

// This transform does nothing.
export default function transform(block) {
  return block;
}

You can run it using the apibara run command. Notice that you need a free API key from Apibara to consume the hosted stream.

apibara run script.js -A  dna_xxx

The indexer script is a self-contained script that is used by Apibara to configure and transform the data stream. If you try to run the script directly using, for example, Node.js or Bun it will not do anything.

• Setup your editor and environment to handle autocompletion.
• Learn how to use NPM packages in your indexers.
• Learn how to access environment variables.
• Learn how to use fetch from an indexer.
• Test your indexer.