The easiest way to spin up a local database

Source: Dev.to

Introduction

I’ve solved a huge pain point for myself, and it has helped me so much at work that I needed to share it with others: local development databases.

Why existing solutions fall short

• Docker – slow, bloated, frustrating, and often overkill.
• XAMPP on Windows – feels like living in the year 2000.
• Postgres.app / DBngin – great for a single database on macOS, but not flexible enough for multiple engines.
• Neon / Supabase / PlanetScale – require constant internet access and don’t handle migrations for you.

When you need to work with MySQL, Postgres, SQLite, or a mix of them—sometimes offline, sometimes on different OSes—the above tools become cumbersome. The biggest headache appears when the PM points out a bug on staging, and your local database no longer mirrors the staging environment. Debugging becomes a nightmare.

Introducing spindb

spindb is a CLI tool that can clone a production database locally into a container and download database engines to run them in lightweight pseudo‑containers—faster and easier than Docker.

Installation

# One‑off execution (no install)
npx spindb

# Preferred: run via pnpm
pnpx spindb

# Global install for repeated use
pnpm i -g spindb

Features

• Multi‑engine support: Postgres, MySQL, SQLite (and soon Redis, MongoDB).
• Cross‑platform: Works on Windows, macOS, and Linux.
• Versioned instances: Run multiple versions side‑by‑side, e.g.
  • Postgres 14 on port 5432
  • Postgres 17 on port 5433
  • MySQL 5.7 on port 3306
  • MySQL 8 on port 3307
• Scriptable: Use in CI pipelines or test suites to spin up databases programmatically.
• Easy management: Quickly create, start, stop, and remove database instances from the command line.

You can find the full documentation in the repository README:

https://github.com/robertjbass/spindb

Future plans

• Add Redis and MongoDB support.
• Continue improving Windows compatibility and overall stability.

This is a labor of love. Feedback is welcome—feel free to star the repo or share your thoughts.