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Relational databases

TypeScript
PlanetScale

Learn how to create a new Node.js or TypeScript project from scratch by connecting Prisma ORM to your database and generating a Prisma Client for database access. The following tutorial introduces you to the Prisma CLI, Prisma Client, and Prisma Migrate.

Prerequisites​

In order to successfully complete this guide, you need:

warning

This tutorial will also assume that you can push to the main branch of your database. Do not do this if your main branch has been promoted to production.

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 ORM, 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

Next, initialize a TypeScript project and add the Prisma CLI as a development dependency to it:

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

This creates a package.json with an initial setup for your TypeScript app.

Next, initialize TypeScript:

npx tsc --init
info

See installation instructions to learn how to install Prisma using a different package manager.

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

npx prisma

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

npx prisma init

This command does two things:

  • creates a new directory called prisma that contains a file called schema.prisma, which contains the Prisma schema with your database connection variable and schema models
  • creates the .env file in the root directory of the project, which is used for defining environment variables (such as your database connection)