LocalStash

LocalStash is a fast, minimalistic in-memory key/value cache, with support for expiration. In essence, it's quite similar to other key/value stores like memcached, except that LocalStash only keeps things in the current process's memory, and not in some external service. LocalStash has no external dependencies.

Why would I use this?

Sometimes you want to store some calculated, or externally retrieved values, because you know you may need them again very soon. Nonetheless, you don't want to keep them around for too long. That's where the ability to expire information comes in handy. LocalStash has its own garbage collection mechanism for expiring old data. The main design considerations are a small performance overhead, and a fast garbage collection mechanism.

API

LocalStash exposes the following APIs:

new LocalStash([cycleInterval], [options])

cycleInterval is the garbage collection cycle interval, in seconds. If you tend to store a lot of data, with short TTL values, it is recommended to use a relatively low interval. If data generally has a high TTL, you may want to raise the interval.

options is an object for passing options to the cache. The following values are supported:

maxKeys (integer, default: null). Can be set to limit the total amount of values that may be stored in the cache. If this value gets exceeded, the values that will expire soonest will be made to expire prematurely.

aggressiveExpiration (boolean, default: false). If set to true, even if a get() call yields a value, and that value is expired (just not yet garbage collected), it will not be returned.

cache.flush()

Resets the entire cache to zero.

cache.diagnostics()

Returns an object containing information about the state of the cache.

cache.add(key, value, [ttl], [touchIfExists])

Adds a value to the cache, optionally expiring after ttl seconds. If a value with that key did not yet exist, it will be created and the new value will be returned. If a value did exist, it will not be overwritten, and instead that existing value will be returned. Also, if touchIfExists is true, the existing value will get ttl as a new time-to-live.

cache.set(key, value, [ttl])

Adds a value to the cache, optionally expiring after ttl seconds. If a value with that key already exists, it will be overwritten. For chainability, set() will return the value.

cache.touch(key, ttl)

Resets the value's expiration time to now + ttl seconds. The value that key holds will be returned.

cache.del(key)

Deletes the value with key key from the cache. If the value existed, this deleted value will be returned. If it did not exist, undefined will be returned.

cache.get(key, newTTL)

Returns the value stored by key key. If it does not exist, undefined will be returned. If newTTL is defined, the value will be "touched" with the new TTL.

cache.getExpirationTime(key)

Yields the time (unix timestamp in seconds) at which the value for key key will expire. if the value will never expire, null is returned. If the value does not exist, undefined is returned.

Example

var LocalStash = require('localstash').LocalStash;
 
// instantiate
 
var options = {};
 
var cache = new LocalStash(60, options);
 
// set key "hello" to value "world" and expire after 30 seconds.
 
cache.set('hello', 'world', 30);
 
// adding a key called "hello" will now fail and return the previous value "world".
 
cache.add('hello', 'foo');
 
// print "hello world"
 
console.log('hello', cache.get('hello'));
 
// extend expiration to 120 seconds after now
 
cache.touch('hello', 120);
 
// cleanup prematurely, because we can
 
cache.del('hello');

License

LocalStash uses the MIT License.