Deploy to Cloudflare Workers & Pages

This page covers everything you need to know to deploy an app with Prisma ORM to a Cloudflare Worker or to Cloudflare Pages.

General considerations when deploying to Cloudflare Workers

This section covers general things you need to be aware of when deploying to Cloudflare Workers or Pages and are using Prisma ORM, regardless of the database provider you use.

Using Prisma Postgres

You can use Prisma Postgres and deploy to Cloudflare Workers.

After you create a Worker, run:

npx prisma@latest init --db

Enter a name for your project and choose a database region.

This command:

• Connects your CLI to your account. If you're not logged in or don't have an account, your browser will open to guide you through creating a new account or signing into your existing one.
• Creates a prisma directory containing a schema.prisma file for your database models.
• Creates a .env file with your DATABASE_URL (e.g., for Prisma Postgres it should have something similar to DATABASE_URL="prisma+postgres://accelerate.prisma-data.net/?api_key=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI...").

You'll need to install the Client extension required to use Prisma Postgres:

npm i @prisma/extension-accelerate

And extend PrismaClient with the extension in your application code:

import { PrismaClient } from "@prisma/client/edge";
import { withAccelerate } from "@prisma/extension-accelerate";

export interface Env {
  DATABASE_URL: string;
}

export default {
  async fetch(request, env, ctx) {
    const prisma = new PrismaClient({
      datasourceUrl: env.DATABASE_URL,
    }).$extends(withAccelerate());

    const users = await prisma.user.findMany();
    const result = JSON.stringify(users);
    return new Response(result);
  },
} satisfies ExportedHandler<Env>;

Then setup helper scripts to perform migrations and generate PrismaClient as shown in this section.

note

You need to have the dotenv-cli package installed as Cloudflare Workers does not support .env files. You can do this by running the following command to install the package locally in your project: npm install -D dotenv-cli.

Using an edge-compatible driver

When deploying a Cloudflare Worker that uses Prisma ORM, you need to use an edge-compatible driver and its respective driver adapter for Prisma ORM.

The edge-compatible drivers for Cloudflare Workers and Pages are:

• Neon Serverless uses HTTP to access the database
• PlanetScale Serverless uses HTTP to access the database
• node-postgres (pg) uses Cloudflare's connect() (TCP) to access the database
• @libsql/client is used to access Turso databases via HTTP
• Cloudflare D1 is used to access D1 databases

There's also work being done on the node-mysql2 driver which will enable access to traditional MySQL databases from Cloudflare Workers and Pages in the future as well.

note

If your application uses PostgreSQL, we recommend using Prisma Postgres. It is fully supported on edge runtimes and does not require a specialized edge-compatible driver. For other databases, Prisma Accelerate extends edge compatibility so you can connect to any database from any edge function provider.

Setting your database connection URL as an environment variable

First, ensure that the DATABASE_URL is set as the url of the datasource in your Prisma schema:

datasource db {
  provider = "postgresql" // this might also be `mysql` or another value depending on your database
  url      = env("DATABASE_URL")
}

Development

When using your Worker in development, you can configure your database connection via the .dev.vars file locally.

Assuming you use the DATABASE_URL environment variable from above, you can set it inside .dev.vars as follows:

.dev.vars

DATABASE_URL="your-database-connection-string"

In the above snippet, your-database-connection-string is a placeholder that you need to replace with the value of your own connection string, for example:

.dev.vars

DATABASE_URL="postgresql://admin:mypassword42@somehost.aws.com:5432/mydb"

Note that the .dev.vars file is not compatible with .env files which are typically used by Prisma ORM.

This means that you need to make sure that Prisma ORM gets access to the environment variable when needed, e.g. when running a Prisma CLI command like prisma migrate dev.

There are several options for achieving this:

• Run your Prisma CLI commands using dotenv to specify from where the CLI should read the environment variable, for example:

  dotenv -e .dev.vars -- npx prisma migrate dev
• Create a script in package.json that reads .dev.vars via dotenv. You can then execute prisma commands as follows: npm run env -- npx prisma migrate dev. Here's a reference for the script:
  package.json

  "scripts":  { "env": "dotenv -e .dev.vars" }
• Duplicate the DATABASE_URL and any other relevant env vars into a new file called .env which can then be used by Prisma ORM.

note

If you're using an approach that requires dotenv, you need to have the dotenv-cli package installed. You can do this e.g. by using this command to install the package locally in your project: npm install -D dotenv-cli.

Production

When deploying your Worker to production, you'll need to set the database connection using the wrangler CLI:

npx wrangler secret put DATABASE_URL

The command is interactive and will ask you to enter the value for the DATABASE_URL env var as the next step in the terminal.

note

This command requires you to be authenticated, and will ask you to log in to your Cloudflare account in case you are not.

Size limits on free accounts

Cloudflare has a size limit of 3 MB for Workers on the free plan. If your application bundle with Prisma ORM exceeds that size, we recommend upgrading to a paid Worker plan or using Prisma Accelerate to deploy your application.

If you're running into this problem with pg and the @prisma/adapter-pg package, you can replace the pg with the custom @prisma/pg-worker package and use the @prisma/adapter-pg-worker adapter that belongs to it.

@prisma/pg-worker is an optimized and lightweight version of pg that is designed to be used in a Worker. It is a drop-in replacement for pg and is fully compatible with Prisma ORM.

Deploying a Next.js app to Cloudflare Pages with @cloudflare/next-on-pages

Cloudflare offers an option to run Next.js apps on Cloudflare Pages with @cloudflare/next-on-pages, see the docs for instructions.

Based on some testing, we found the following:

• You can deploy using the PlanetScale or Neon Serverless Driver.
• Traditional PostgreSQL deployments using pg don't work because pg itself currently does not work with @cloudflare/next-on-pages (see here).

Feel free to reach out to us on Discord if you find that anything has changed about this.

Set PRISMA_CLIENT_FORCE_WASM=1 when running locally with node

Some frameworks (e.g. hono) use node instead of wrangler for running Workers locally. If you're using such a framework or are running your Worker locally with node for another reason, you need to set the PRISMA_CLIENT_FORCE_WASM environment variable:

export PRISMA_CLIENT_FORCE_WASM=1

Database-specific considerations & examples

This section provides database-specific instructions for deploying a Cloudflare Worker with Prisma ORM.

Prerequisites

As a prerequisite for the following section, you need to have a Cloudflare Worker running locally and the Prisma CLI installed.

If you don't have that yet, you can run these commands:

npm create cloudflare@latest prisma-cloudflare-worker-example -- --type hello-world
cd prisma-cloudflare-worker-example
npm install prisma --save-dev && npm install @prisma/client
npx prisma init --output ../generated/prisma

You'll further need a database instance of your database provider of choice available. Refer to the respective documentation of the provider for setting up that instance.

We'll use the default User model for the example below:

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

PostgreSQL (traditional)

If you are using a traditional PostgreSQL database that's accessed via TCP and the pg driver, you need to:

• use the @prisma/adapter-pg database adapter (via the driverAdapters Preview feature)
• set node_compat = true in wrangler.toml (see the Cloudflare docs)

If you are running into a size issue and can't deploy your application because of that, you can use our slimmer variant of the pg driver package @prisma/pg-worker and the @prisma/adapter-pg-worker adapter that belongs to it.

@prisma/pg-worker is an optimized and lightweight version of pg that is designed to be used in a Worker. It is a drop-in replacement for pg and is fully compatible with Prisma ORM.

1. Configure Prisma schema & database connection

note

If you don't have a project to deploy, follow the instructions in the Prerequisites to bootstrap a basic Cloudflare Worker with Prisma ORM in it.

First, ensure that the database connection is configured properly. In your Prisma schema, set the url of the datasource block to the DATABASE_URL environment variable. You also need to enable the driverAdapters feature flag:

schema.prisma

generator client {
  provider        = "prisma-client-js"
  previewFeatures = ["driverAdapters"]
}

datasource db {
  provider = "postgresql"
  url      = env("DATABASE_URL")
}

Next, you need to set the DATABASE_URL environment variable to the value of your database connection string. You'll do this in a file called .dev.vars used by Cloudflare:

.dev.vars

DATABASE_URL="postgresql://admin:mypassword42@somehost.aws.com:5432/mydb"

Because the Prisma CLI by default is only compatible with .env files, you can adjust your package.json with the following script that loads the env vars from .dev.vars. You can then use this script to load the env vars before executing a prisma command.

Add this script to your package.json:

package.json

{
  // ...
  "scripts": {
    // ....
    "env": "dotenv -e .dev.vars"
  },
  // ...
}

Now you can execute Prisma CLI commands as follows while ensuring that the command has access to the env vars in .dev.vars:

npm run env -- npx prisma

2. Install dependencies

Next, install the required packages:

npm install @prisma/adapter-pg

3. Set node_compat = true in wrangler.toml

In your wrangler.toml file, add the following line:

wrangler.toml

node_compat = true

note

For Cloudflare Pages, using node_compat is not officially supported. If you want to use pg in Cloudflare Pages, you can find a workaround here.

4. Migrate your database schema (if applicable)

If you ran npx prisma init above, you need to migrate your database schema to create the User table that's defined in your Prisma schema (if you already have all the tables you need in your database, you can skip this step):

npm run env -- npx prisma migrate dev --name init

5. Use Prisma Client in your Worker to send a query to the database

Here is a sample code snippet that you can use to instantiate PrismaClient and send a query to your database:

import { PrismaClient } from '@prisma/client'
import { PrismaPg } from '@prisma/adapter-pg'

export default {
  async fetch(request, env, ctx) {
    const adapter = new PrismaPg({ connectionString: env.DATABASE_URL })
    const prisma = new PrismaClient({ adapter })

    const users = await prisma.user.findMany()
    const result = JSON.stringify(users)
    return new Response(result)
  },
}

6. Run the Worker locally

To run the Worker locally, you can run the wrangler dev command:

npx wrangler dev

7. Set the DATABASE_URL environment variable and deploy the Worker

To deploy the Worker, you first need to the DATABASE_URL environment variable via the wrangler CLI:

npx wrangler secret put DATABASE_URL

The command is interactive and will ask you to enter the value for the DATABASE_URL env var as the next step in the terminal.

note

This command requires you to be authenticated, and will ask you to log in to your Cloudflare account in case you are not.

Then you can go ahead then deploy the Worker:

npx wrangler deploy

The command will output the URL where you can access the deployed Worker.

PlanetScale

If you are using a PlanetScale database, you need to:

• use the @prisma/adapter-planetscale database adapter (via the driverAdapters Preview feature)

• manually remove the conflicting cache field (learn more):

  export default {
    async fetch(request, env, ctx) {
      const adapter = new PrismaPlanetScale({
        url: env.DATABASE_URL,
        // see https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd/issues/698
        fetch(url, init) {
          delete init['cache']
          return fetch(url, init)
        },
      })
      const prisma = new PrismaClient({ adapter })
  
      // ...
    },
  }

1. Configure Prisma schema & database connection

note

If you don't have a project to deploy, follow the instructions in the Prerequisites to bootstrap a basic Cloudflare Worker with Prisma ORM in it.

First, ensure that the database connection is configured properly. In your Prisma schema, set the url of the datasource block to the DATABASE_URL environment variable. You also need to enable the driverAdapters feature flag:

schema.prisma

generator client {
  provider        = "prisma-client-js"
  previewFeatures = ["driverAdapters"]
}

datasource db {
  provider     = "mysql"
  url          = env("DATABASE_URL")
  relationMode = "prisma" // required for PlanetScale (as by default foreign keys are disabled)
}

Next, you need to set the DATABASE_URL environment variable to the value of your database connection string. You'll do this in a file called .dev.vars used by Cloudflare:

.dev.vars

DATABASE_URL="mysql://32qxa2r7hfl3102wrccj:password@us-east.connect.psdb.cloud/demo-cf-worker-ps?sslaccept=strict"

Because the Prisma CLI by default is only compatible with .env files, you can adjust your package.json with the following script that loads the env vars from .dev.vars. You can then use this script to load the env vars before executing a prisma command.

Add this script to your package.json:

package.json

{
  // ...
  "scripts": {
    // ....
    "env": "dotenv -e .dev.vars"
  },
  // ...
}

Now you can execute Prisma CLI commands as follows while ensuring that the command has access to the env vars in .dev.vars:

npm run env -- npx prisma

2. Install dependencies

Next, install the required packages:

npm install @prisma/adapter-planetscale

3. Migrate your database schema (if applicable)

If you ran npx prisma init above, you need to migrate your database schema to create the User table that's defined in your Prisma schema (if you already have all the tables you need in your database, you can skip this step):

npm run env -- npx prisma db push

4. Use Prisma Client in your Worker to send a query to the database

Here is a sample code snippet that you can use to instantiate PrismaClient and send a query to your database:

import { PrismaClient } from '@prisma/client'
import { PrismaPlanetScale } from '@prisma/adapter-planetscale'

export default {
  async fetch(request, env, ctx) {
    const adapter = new PrismaPlanetScale({
      url: env.DATABASE_URL,
      // see https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd/issues/698
      fetch(url, init) {
        delete init['cache']
        return fetch(url, init)
      },
    })
    const prisma = new PrismaClient({ adapter })

    const users = await prisma.user.findMany()
    const result = JSON.stringify(users)
    return new Response(result)
  },
}

6. Run the Worker locally

To run the Worker locally, you can run the wrangler dev command:

npx wrangler dev

7. Set the DATABASE_URL environment variable and deploy the Worker

To deploy the Worker, you first need to the DATABASE_URL environment variable via the wrangler CLI:

npx wrangler secret put DATABASE_URL

The command is interactive and will ask you to enter the value for the DATABASE_URL env var as the next step in the terminal.

note

This command requires you to be authenticated, and will ask you to log in to your Cloudflare account in case you are not.

Then you can go ahead then deploy the Worker:

npx wrangler deploy

The command will output the URL where you can access the deployed Worker.

Neon

If you are using a Neon database, you need to:

• use the @prisma/adapter-neon database adapter (via the driverAdapters Preview feature)

1. Configure Prisma schema & database connection

note

If you don't have a project to deploy, follow the instructions in the Prerequisites to bootstrap a basic Cloudflare Worker with Prisma ORM in it.

First, ensure that the database connection is configured properly. In your Prisma schema, set the url of the datasource block to the DATABASE_URL environment variable. You also need to enable the driverAdapters feature flag:

schema.prisma

generator client {
  provider        = "prisma-client-js"
  previewFeatures = ["driverAdapters"]
}

datasource db {
  provider = "postgresql"
  url      = env("DATABASE_URL")
}

Next, you need to set the DATABASE_URL environment variable to the value of your database connection string. You'll do this in a file called .dev.vars used by Cloudflare:

.dev.vars

DATABASE_URL="postgresql://janedoe:password@ep-nameless-pond-a23b1mdz.eu-central-1.aws.neon.tech/neondb?sslmode=require"

Because the Prisma CLI by default is only compatible with .env files, you can adjust your package.json with the following script that loads the env vars from .dev.vars. You can then use this script to load the env vars before executing a prisma command.

Add this script to your package.json:

package.json

{
  // ...
  "scripts": {
    // ....
    "env": "dotenv -e .dev.vars"
  },
  // ...
}

Now you can execute Prisma CLI commands as follows while ensuring that the command has access to the env vars in .dev.vars:

npm run env -- npx prisma

2. Install dependencies

Next, install the required packages:

npm install @prisma/adapter-neon

3. Migrate your database schema (if applicable)

If you ran npx prisma init above, you need to migrate your database schema to create the User table that's defined in your Prisma schema (if you already have all the tables you need in your database, you can skip this step):

npm run env -- npx prisma migrate dev --name init

5. Use Prisma Client in your Worker to send a query to the database

Here is a sample code snippet that you can use to instantiate PrismaClient and send a query to your database:

import { PrismaClient } from '@prisma/client'
import { PrismaNeon } from '@prisma/adapter-neon'

export default {
  async fetch(request, env, ctx) {
    const adapter = new PrismaNeon({ connectionString: env.DATABASE_URL })
    const prisma = new PrismaClient({ adapter })

    const users = await prisma.user.findMany()
    const result = JSON.stringify(users)
    return new Response(result)
  },
}

6. Run the Worker locally

To run the Worker locally, you can run the wrangler dev command:

npx wrangler dev

7. Set the DATABASE_URL environment variable and deploy the Worker

To deploy the Worker, you first need to the DATABASE_URL environment variable via the wrangler CLI:

npx wrangler secret put DATABASE_URL

The command is interactive and will ask you to enter the value for the DATABASE_URL env var as the next step in the terminal.

note

This command requires you to be authenticated, and will ask you to log in to your Cloudflare account in case you are not.

Then you can go ahead then deploy the Worker:

npx wrangler deploy

The command will output the URL where you can access the deployed Worker.