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Sharing a graph

Pen-and-ink drawing of a wooden filing cabinet labelled N4L FILES on the left — drawer half-open, stacks of papers inside — with a single arrow pointing to a small CRT computer terminal labelled CACHE on the right. The cabinet is heavily shaded and solid; the terminal is drawn with thinner lines, suggesting it could be replaced at any time.

Share the files, not the database. Your N4L files are the graph; the database is a cache anyone can rebuild from them in seconds.

A collaborator does not need your PostgreSQL, your credentials, or a snapshot. They need the text files you wrote. Given those, one command on their machine produces a graph identical to yours.

The short version

Give them a directory of .n4l files — over a git remote, a zip, a flash drive, anything that moves text around. On their end:

./src/bin/N4L -u *.n4l

Same nodes, same arrows, same query answers. The database on their machine is new; the graph in it is yours.

A concrete example

The repo's reading-list example works as a demo. Clone or copy the folder that contains examples/reading-list.n4l, hand it to a colleague, and they run:

./src/bin/N4L -u examples/reading-list.n4l
./src/bin/searchN4L "decision making"

They see the same three books you see. Nothing else was transferred.

What not to share

  • ~/.SSTorytime. It holds a plaintext password. It is theirs to create on their own machine, with their own database credentials, and to keep chmod 600.
  • The PostgreSQL data directory. It is a cache of what is already in the .n4l files. Copying it wastes bytes and ties the recipient to your exact PostgreSQL version.

What you might share as well

If you have defined your own arrow vocabulary — shorthand names beyond what ships in the project — the arrow declarations live in SSTconfig/. Hand that directory over along with the .n4l files so their ingest recognises the same arrows yours does.

If you have not touched SSTconfig/, nothing extra is needed.

Across machines, across people

There is no special protocol and no server in the middle. Sharing a graph is sharing files; the graph reappears wherever those files are ingested. Version-control them and the sharing story becomes the same one you already use for code.