Start from scratch

Prerequisites

In order to successfully complete this guide, you need:

See System requirements for exact version requirements.

Make sure you have your database connection URL at hand. If you don't have a database server running and just want to explore Prisma, check out the Quickstart.

Create project setup

As a first step, create a project directory and navigate into it:

$mkdir hello-prisma
$cd hello-prisma

$npm init -y
$npm install prisma typescript ts-node @types/node --save-dev

tsconfig.json
1{
2  "compilerOptions": {
3    "sourceMap": true,
4    "outDir": "dist",
5    "strict": true,
6    "lib": ["esnext"],
7    "esModuleInterop": true
8  }
9}

$npm init -y
$npm install prisma --save-dev

You can now invoke the Prisma CLI by prefixing it with npx:

$npx prisma

Next, set up your Prisma project by creating your Prisma schema file with the following command:

$npx prisma init

This command created a new directory called prisma which contains a file called schema.prisma and a .env file in the root of the project. schema.prisma contains the Prisma schema with your database connection and the Prisma Client generator. .env is a dotenv file for defining environment variables (used for your database connection).