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Connect your database

JavaScript
CockroachDB

Connecting your database​

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")
}

Note that the default schema created by prisma init uses PostgreSQL as the provider. For CockroachDB, you need to edit the datasource block to use the cockroachdb provider instead:

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

The url is set via an environment variable which is defined in .env. You now need to adjust the connection URL to point to your own database.

Connection URL

The format of the connection URL for your database depends on the database you use. CockroachDB uses the PostgreSQL connection URL format, which has the following structure (the parts spelled all-uppercased are placeholders for your specific connection details):

postgresql://USER:PASSWORD@HOST:PORT/DATABASE?PARAMETERS

Here's a short explanation of each component:

  • USER: The name of your database user
  • PASSWORD: The password for your database user
  • PORT: The port where your database server is running. The default for CockroachDB is 26257.
  • DATABASE: The name of the database
  • PARAMETERS: Any additional connection parameters. See the CockroachDB documentation here.

For a CockroachDB Serverless or Cockroach Dedicated database hosted on CockroachDB Cloud, the connection URL looks similar to this:

.env
DATABASE_URL="postgresql://<myusername>:<mypassword>@<short-id>.<region>.cockroachlabs.cloud:26257/defaultdb?sslmode=verify-full&sslrootcert=$HOME/.postgresql/root.crt&options=--<mycluster>"

To find your connection string on CockroachDB Cloud, click the 'Connect' button on the overview page for your database cluster, and select the 'Connection string' tab.

For a CockroachDB database hosted locally, the connection URL looks similar to this:

.env
DATABASE_URL="postgresql://root@localhost:26257?sslmode=disable"

Your connection string is displayed as part of the welcome text when starting CockroachDB from the command line.