Prisma ORM

Prisma ORM is a TypeScript-first ORM with a declarative schema, auto-generated type-safe client, and visual database browser.

Prisma support is currently under active development. Automatic schema migrations via prisma migrate are not yet supported. Use npx prisma db push from a clean database instead.

The official getting-started tutorial works out of the box with CedarDB, with minor adjustments noted below.

Setting up CedarDB

Start CedarDB in server mode and create a user and database:

./cedardb --createdb mydb
psql -h /tmp -U postgres

create user myuser with password 'mypassword' superuser;
create database mydb;

Then enable TCP connections:

./cedardb mydb --address=::

For more details, see the install guide.

Installing

Create a new Node.js project and install Prisma with the PostgreSQL adapter:

mkdir hello-prisma && cd hello-prisma
npm init -y
npm install typescript tsx @types/node --save-dev
npx tsc --init
npm install prisma @types/pg --save-dev
npm install @prisma/client @prisma/adapter-pg pg dotenv

Set "type": "module" in package.json and configure tsconfig.json for ESM:

tsconfig.json
{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "module": "ESNext",
    "moduleResolution": "bundler",
    "target": "ES2023",
    "strict": true,
    "esModuleInterop": true,
    "ignoreDeprecations": "6.0"
  }
}

Connecting

Initialize Prisma:

npx prisma init --datasource-provider postgresql --output ../generated/prisma

This creates a prisma/schema.prisma and a .env file. Set your CedarDB connection string in .env:

.env
DATABASE_URL="postgresql://myuser:mypassword@localhost:5432/mydb?schema=public"

Instantiate the Prisma client in lib/prisma.ts:

lib/prisma.ts
import "dotenv/config";
import { PrismaPg } from "@prisma/adapter-pg";
import { PrismaClient } from "../generated/prisma/client";

const connectionString = `${process.env.DATABASE_URL}`;

const adapter = new PrismaPg({ connectionString });
const prisma = new PrismaClient({ adapter });

export { prisma };

Defining a Schema

Edit prisma/schema.prisma to define your models:

prisma/schema.prisma

generator client {
  provider = "prisma-client"
  output   = "../generated/prisma"
}

datasource db {
  provider = "postgresql"
}

model User {
  id    Int     @id @default(autoincrement())
  email String  @unique
  name  String?
  posts Post[]
}

model Post {
  id        Int     @id @default(autoincrement())
  title     String
  content   String?
  published Boolean @default(false)
  author    User    @relation(fields: [authorId], references: [id])
  authorId  Int
}

Applying the Schema

Push the schema to CedarDB using prisma db push (note: prisma migrate is not yet supported):

npx prisma db push

Then generate the Prisma client:

npx prisma generate

Querying

Create a script.ts to run queries against CedarDB:

script.ts
import { prisma } from "./lib/prisma";

async function main() {
  // Create a user with a related post
  const user = await prisma.user.create({
    data: {
      name: "Alice",
      email: "alice@prisma.io",
      posts: {
        create: {
          title: "Hello World",
          content: "This is my first post!",
          published: true,
        },
      },
    },
    include: {
      posts: true,
    },
  });
  console.log("Created user:", user);

  // Fetch all users with their posts
  const allUsers = await prisma.user.findMany({
    include: { posts: true },
  });
  console.log("All users:", JSON.stringify(allUsers, null, 2));
}

main()
  .then(async () => { await prisma.$disconnect(); })
  .catch(async (e) => {
    console.error(e);
    await prisma.$disconnect();
    process.exit(1);
  });

Run the script:

$ npx tsx script.ts
User created successfully.
All users:  [
  {
    "id": 1,
    "email": "alice@prisma.io",
    "name": "Alice",
    "posts": [
      {
        "id": 1,
        "title": "Hello World",
        "content": "This is my first post!",
        "published": true,
        "authorId": 1
      }
    ]
  }
]

Known Limitations

CedarDB’s Prisma support is actively being developed. The following are known limitations:

Schema migrations (prisma migrate dev) are not supported. Use npx prisma db push to apply schema changes directly to the database instead.

Drop database of non-empty databases is not supported. To reset your database, manually drop all contained objects and recreate it via psql:

<drop all contained objects>
drop database mydb;
create database mydb;

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