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Connect your database

JavaScript
PostgreSQL

To connect your database, you need to set the url field of the datasource block in your Prisma schema to your database connection URL:

prisma/schema.prisma
datasource db {
  provider = "postgresql"
  url      = env("DATABASE_URL")
}

In this case, the url is set via an environment variable which is defined in .env:

.env
DATABASE_URL="postgresql://johndoe:randompassword@localhost:5432/mydb?schema=public"
info

We recommend adding .env to your .gitignore file to prevent committing your environment variables.

You now need to adjust the connection URL to point to your own database.

The format of the connection URL for your database depends on the database you use. For PostgreSQL, it looks as follows (the parts spelled all-uppercased are placeholders for your specific connection details):

postgresql://USER:PASSWORD@HOST:PORT/DATABASE?schema=SCHEMA

Here's a short explanation of each component:

  • USER: The name of your database user
  • PASSWORD: The password for your database user
  • HOST: The name of your host name (for the local environment, it is localhost)
  • PORT: The port where your database server is running (typically 5432 for PostgreSQL)
  • DATABASE: The name of the database
  • SCHEMA: The name of the schema inside the database

If you're unsure what to provide for the schema parameter for a PostgreSQL connection URL, you can probably omit it. In that case, the default schema name public will be used.

As an example, for a PostgreSQL database hosted on Heroku, the connection URL might look similar to this:

.env
DATABASE_URL="postgresql://opnmyfngbknppm:[email protected]:5432/d50rgmkqi2ipus?schema=hello-prisma"

When running PostgreSQL locally on macOS, your user and password as well as the database name typically correspond to the current user of your OS, e.g. assuming the user is called janedoe:

.env
DATABASE_URL="postgresql://janedoe:janedoe@localhost:5432/janedoe?schema=hello-prisma"