Key-Value Storage

What is Key-Value Storage and what is it for?

Key-Value Storage is a reusable piece of a Holochain app that saves and retrieves simple key/value pairs, so an app can keep small facts such as a setting or a preference without its developer writing a storage layer from scratch. It was built to feel familiar, following the browser's own local storage and session storage conventions while holding several separate named stores.

Key-Value Storage was published in 2020 under holochain-open-dev, a collection of shared building blocks that Holochain app developers could reuse instead of rebuilding the same basics in every app. Its README opened with a note that it compiled and ran on the Holochain development kit of the time, and it was released under the MIT licence.

The component's idea was deliberately ordinary. Instead of inventing their own storage, developers got a key/value shelf much like the one browsers expose to web pages, with several independent stores rather than a single one. Its README describes it plainly as a simple general "database" for Holochain apps, and says the API stays close to the Web storage specifications so the shape would already feel familiar.

The README's own worked example shows what that looked like in practice: it creates a store named ui-state, writes a chosen theme under one key and a preference under another, then reads a value back by key. Readers who wanted more were pointed at the repository's tests, because the README's installation section was still marked as to be written and its promised sample app had not appeared when the repository was archived in 2022.

From 3 public sources, checked 23 September 2026.