Prisma

Prisma is an ORM for TypeScript, that allows you to define your database schema and models in a schema.prisma file, and then generate a type-safe client that can be used to interact with your database from your backend.

Prisma Client

Located at /server/db/client.ts, the Prisma Client is instantiated as a global variable (as recommended as best practice by the team at Prisma) and exported to be used in your API routes. We include the Prisma Client in Context by default and recommend using this instead of importing it separately in each file.

Schema

You will find the Prisma schema file at /prisma/schema.prisma. This file is where you define your database schema and models, and is used when generating the Prisma Client.

With NextAuth.js

When you select NextAuth.js in combination with Prisma, the schema file is generated and set up for you with the recommended values for the User, Session, Account, and VerificationToken models, as per the NextAuth.js documentation.

Default Database

The default database is an SQLite database, which is great for development and quickly spinning up a proof-of-concept but is not recommended for production. You can change the database to use by changing the provider in the datasource block to either postgresql or mysql, and then updating the connection string within environment variables to point to your database.

Seeding your Database

Seeding your database is a great way to quickly populate your database with test data to help you get started. In order to setup seeding, you will need to create a seed.ts file in the /prisma directory, and then add a seed script to your package.json file. You’ll also need some TypeScript runner that can execute the seed-script. We recommend tsx, which is a very performant TypeScript runner that uses esbuild and doesn’t require any ESM configuration, but ts-node or other runners will work as well.

{
  "scripts": {
    "db-seed": "NODE_ENV=development prisma db seed"
  },
  "prisma": {
    "seed": "tsx prisma/seed.ts"
  }
}

import { prisma } from "../src/server/db/client";

async function main() {
  const id = "cl9ebqhxk00003b600tymydho";
  await prisma.example.upsert({
    where: {
      id,
    },
    create: {
      id,
    },
    update: {},
  });
}

main()
  .then(async () => {
    await prisma.$disconnect();
  })
  .catch(async (e) => {
    console.error(e);
    await prisma.$disconnect();
    process.exit(1);
  });

Then, just run pnpm db-seed (or npm/yarn) to seed your database.

Useful Resources