Connecting to RethinkDB

Now that we have everything installed, it's time to start interacting with RethinkDB through Node.js. In the following examples, we'll be adding some fake data to a table in our RethinkDB cluster. We'll be running these commands on a server running Ubuntu Linux.

To start, let's look at how to connect to our RethinkDB instance. First, make sure that your database is up and running. If it's not running, you can start RethinkDB by executing the following command from a terminal window:

sudo /etc/init.d/rethinkdb start

This will start the database. Now, let's have a look at the code used to connect to our instance:

r.connect({host: 'localhost', port: 28015 }, function(err, conn) {
    //
});

As you can see, the RethinkDB module provides us with a connect function, which creates a new connection to the database. This function accepts a few parameters, such as the server host and port. Optionally, you can also specify the name of the database and an authentication key (more...