Prisma is a database toolkit that consists of these tools:
- Prisma Client: Auto-generated and type-safe query builder for Node.js & TypeScript
- Prisma Migrate (experimental): Declarative data modeling & migration system
- Prisma Studio (experimental): GUI to view and edit data in your database
Prisma Client can be used in any Node.js or TypeScript backend application (including serverless applications and microservices). This can be a REST API, a GraphQL API a gRPC API or anything else that needs a database.
Are you looking for Prisma 1? The Prisma 1 repository has been renamed to
prisma/prisma1.
The fastest way to get started with Prisma is by following the Quickstart (5 min).
The Quickstart is based on a preconfigured SQLite database. You can also get started with your own database (PostgreSQL and MySQL) by following one of these guides:
- Add Prisma to an existing project
- Setup a new project with Prisma from scratch (SQL migrations + introspection)
- Setup a new project with Prisma from scratch (Prisma Migrate)
This section provides a high-level overview of how Prisma works and its most important technical components. For a more thorough introduction, visit the Prisma documentation.
Every project that uses a tool from the Prisma toolkit starts with a Prisma schema file. The Prisma schema allows developers to define their application models in an intuitive data modeling language. It also contains the connection to a database and defines a generator:
datasource db {
provider = "postgresql"
url = env("DATABASE_URL")
}
generator client {
provider = "prisma-client-js"
}
model Post {
id Int @id @default(autoincrement())
title String
content String?
published Boolean @default(false)
author User? @relation(fields: [authorId], references: [id])
authorId Int?
}
model User {
id Int @id @default(autoincrement())
email String @unique
name String?
posts Post[]
}In this schema, you configure three things:
- Data source: Specifies your database connection (via an environment variable)
- Generator: Indicates that you want to genenerate Prisma Client
- Data model: Defines your application models
On this page, the focus is on the data model. You can learn more about Data sources and Generators on the respective docs pages.
The data model is a collection of models. A model has two major functions:
- Represent a table in the underlying database
- Provide the foundation for the queries in the Prisma Client API
There are two major workflows for "getting" a data model into your Prisma schema:
- Generate the data model from introspecting a database
- Manually writing the data model and mapping it to the database with Prisma Migrate
Once the data model is defined, you can generate Prisma Client which will expose CRUD and more queries for the defined models. If you're using TypeScript, you'll get full type-safety for all queries (even when only retrieving the subsets of a model's fields).
The first step when using Prisma Client is installing its npm package:
npm install @prisma/client
Note that the installation of this package invokes the prisma generate command which reads your Prisma schema and generates the Prisma Client code. The code will be located in node_modules/@prisma/client.
After you change your data model, you'll need to manually re-generate Prisma Client to ensure the code inside node_modules/@prisma/client get updated:
prisma generate
Note that because the Prisma Client node module contains specific context about your Prisma schema, it's sometimes referred to as a "smart node module".
Once Prisma Client was generated, you can import in your code and send queries to your database. This is what the setup code looks like.
You can import and instantiate Prisma Client as follows:
import { PrismaClient } from '@prisma/client'
const prisma = new PrismaClient()or
const { PrismaClient } = require('@prisma/client')
const prisma = new PrismaClient()Now you can start sending queries via the generated Prisma Client API, here are a few sample queries. Note that all Prisma Client queries return plain old JavaScript objects.
Learn more about the available operations in the Prisma Client API reference or watch this demo video (2 min).
// Run inside `async` function
const allUsers = await prisma.user.findMany()// Run inside `async` function
const allUsers = await prisma.user.findMany({
include: { posts: true },
})// Run inside `async` function
const filteredPosts = await prisma.post.findMany({
where: {
OR: [
{ title: { contains: 'prisma' } },
{ content: { contains: 'prisma' } },
],
},
})// Run inside `async` function
const user = await prisma.user.create({
data: {
name: 'Alice',
email: 'alice@prisma.io',
posts: {
create: { title: 'Join us for Prisma Day 2020' },
},
},
})// Run inside `async` function
const post = await prisma.post.update({
where: { id: 42 },
data: { published: true },
})Note that when using TypeScript, the result of this query will be statically typed so that you can't accidentally access a property that doesn't exist (and any typos are caught at compile-time). Learn more about leveraging Prisma Client's generated types on the Advanced usage of generated types page in the docs.
Prisma has a large and supportive community of enthusiastic application developers. You can join us on Slack and here on GitHub.
You can ask questions and initiate discussions about Prisma-related topics in the prisma repository on GitHub.
If you see an error message or run into an issue, please make sure to create a bug report! You can find best practices for creating bug reports (like including additional debugging output) in the docs).
If Prisma currently doesn't have a certain, be sure to check out the roadmap to see if this is already planned for the future.
If the feature on the roadmap is linked to a GitHub issue, please make sure to leave a +1 on the issue and ideally a comment with your thoughts about the feature!
Read more about how to contribute to Prisma here
