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Visualize graphs in Kuzu Explorer

What is Kuzu Explorer?

Kuzu Explorer is a browser-based frontend to visualize and explore Kuzu database schemas and query results in the form of a graph, table, or JSON. This is a useful tool for exploring your graph data and debugging your data model during the prototyping phase. An example visualization is shown below.

Launching Kuzu Explorer

Kuzu Explorer is a web application that is launched from a deployed Docker image. Please refer to the Docker documentation for details on how to install and use Docker.

Below we show two different ways to launch Kuzu Explorer. Each of these options make Kuzu Explorer accessible on http://localhost:8000. If the launching is successful, you should see the logs similar to the following in your shell:

Terminal window
Access mode: READ_WRITE
Version of Kuzu: v0.0.11
Deployed server started on port: 8000

Option 1: Using an existing database

To access an existing Kuzu database, you can mount its path to the /database directory as follows:

Terminal window
docker run -p 8000:8000 \
           -v /absolute/path/to/database:/database \
           --rm kuzudb/explorer:latest

By mounting local database files to Docker via -v /absolute/path/to/database:/database, the changes done in the UI will persist to the local database files after the UI is shutdown.

The --rm flag tells docker that the container should automatically be removed after we close docker.

Option 2: Start with an empty database with example data

You can also launch Kuzu Explorer without specifying an existing database. Kuzu Explorer comes with bundled datasets that you can use to explore the basic functionalities of Kuzu. This is simply done by removing the -v flag in the example above. If no database path is specified with -v, the server will be started with an empty database.

Terminal window
docker run -p 8000:8000 --rm kuzudb/explorer:latest

Click on the Datasets tab on the top right corner and then: (i) you can select one of the bundled dataset of your choice from the drow-down menu; (ii) load it into Kuzu by clicking the “Load Dataset” button; and (iii) finally use Kuzu Explorer to explore it.

Additional launch configurations

Access mode

By default, Kuzu Explorer is launched in READ_WRITE mode, which means that you can modify the database. If you want to launch Kuzu Explorer in read-only mode, you can do so by setting the MODE environment variable to READ_ONLY as shown below.

Terminal window
docker run -p 8000:8000 \
           -v /absolute/path/to/database:/database \
           -e MODE=READ_ONLY \
           --rm kuzudb/explorer:latest

In read-only mode, you can still issue read queries (such as MATCH) and visualize the results, but you cannot run queries that require write access (such as MERGE, CREATE or SET), or modify the database schema.

In-memory mode

By default, Kuzu Explorer is launched under on-disk mode, in which the database exists on disk. If you want to launch Kuzu Explorer to operate on an in-memory database, you can do so by setting the KUZU_IN_MEMORY environment variable to true as follows.

Terminal window
docker run -p 8000:8000 \
           -e KUZU_IN_MEMORY=true \
           --rm kuzudb/explorer:latest

You can think of an in-memory database as ephemeral, where the database exists purely in memory — all changes are lost when the Docker container is stopped, so mounting a database directory with -v does nothing in this case.

Buffer pool size

By default, Kuzu Explorer is launched with a maximum buffer pool size of 80% of the available memory. If you want to launch Kuzu Explorer with a different buffer pool size, you can do so by setting the KUZU_BUFFER_POOL_SIZE environment variable to the desired value in bytes as follows.

For example, to launch Kuzu Explorer with a buffer pool size of 1GB, you can run the following command.

Terminal window
docker run -p 8000:8000 \
           -v /absolute/path/to/database:/database \
           -e KUZU_BUFFER_POOL_SIZE=1073741824 \
           --rm kuzudb/explorer:latest

Accessing data files in the container

As mentioned above, Kuzu Explorer is launched from a Docker image. If you want to access the data files in the container, you can do so by mounting a directory on your host machine as follows:

Terminal window
docker run -p 8000:8000 \
           -v /absolute/path/to/database:/database \
           -v /absolute/path/to/data:/data \
           --rm kuzudb/explorer:latest

With this configuration, the data directory you specify on your host machine will be accessible as /data in the container. For example, in the shell panel, you can copy a CSV file into your database by running the following command:

COPY Test FROM "test.csv" (HEADER=true);

Note that it is possible to mount multiple directories in the container. For more details, refer to the Docker documentation.

Panels

Kuzu Explorer comes with the following panels, accessible on the top-right of the menu bar. You can refer to the corresponding cards below for more details.

Shell panel
Schema panel
Import panel
Settings panel

Deep dive tutorial

For a deep dive walkthrough of Kuzu Explorer, check out the following video on YouTube:

Development build of Kuzu Explorer

If you are working with the nightly build of Kuzu to access the bleeding edge features, the stable release of Kuzu Explorer may not be compatible with it due to storage format changes. In this case, you can use the development build of Kuzu Explorer, which we also make available on DockerHub.

To install the dev build, you can attach the dev tag to the docker command as follows:

Terminal window
docker run -p 8000:8000 \
           -v /absolute/path/to/database:/database \
           --rm kuzudb/explorer:dev

The dev build of Kuzu Explorer is compatible with the nightly build of Kuzu, but it’s not guaranteed to be stable (and can contain bugs), so the dev build of Kuzu Explorer is recommended for testing purposes only.