Set up Prisma

Goals

On this page, you will learn how to:

• Install the Prisma CLI
• Set up a Prisma Demo server with a sandboxed database
• Read and write data using the Prisma client

Install the Prisma CLI

The Prisma CLI is used for various Prisma workflows. You can install it using Homebrew or NPM:

brew tap prisma/prisma
brew install prisma
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Set up Prisma

To bootstrap the configuration files for your Prisma setup, create a new directory and initalize it using the prisma init command:

mkdir hello-world
cd hello-world
prisma init
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After running prisma init, the Prisma CLI prompts you to select how you want to deploy Prisma:

1. Select Demo server from the list.
2. When your browser opens, register with Prisma Cloud. This is needed because that's where the Demo server is hosted.
3. Go back to your terminal.

4. Confirm the suggested values for the following questions by hitting Return:

   1. The region where Prisma service should be hosted
   2. The name for Prisma service
   3. The stage for Prisma service
5. Select Prisma TypeScript Client to generate Prisma client for TypeScript.

Deploy Prisma

The interactive wizard created the minimal Prisma configuration based on a hosted demo database: prisma.yml and datamodel.prisma. Prisma now needs to be deployed so you can use the Prisma API:

prisma deploy
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Congratulations, you have successfully deployed Prisma. You now have a free and hosted demo database (AWS Aurora) available in Prisma Cloud and are ready to use the Prisma client to read and write to it from your code.

Prepare TypeScript application

Create your tsconfig.json with the following command:

touch tsconfig.json
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Add the following configuration to the tsconfig.json file:

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "lib": ["es2016", "esnext.asynciterable"]
  }
}
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Next, initialize an empty NPM project in the current directory and install the required dependencies:

npm init -y
npm install --save prisma-client-lib graphql
npm install --save-dev typescript ts-node
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Almost done! Run the following command to create an empty TypeScript script:

touch index.ts
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Great, you're now ready to write some code and talk to your database programmatically!

Read and write data using the Prisma client

Add the following code in index.ts:

import { prisma } from './generated/prisma-client'

// A `main` function so that we can use async/await
async function main() {
  // Create a new user called `Alice`
  const newUser = await prisma.createUser({ name: 'Alice' })
  console.log(`Created new user: ${newUser.name} (ID: ${newUser.id})`)

  // Read all users from the database and print them to the console
  const allUsers = await prisma.users()
  console.log(allUsers)
}

main().catch(e => console.error(e))
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Before executing the code, go ahead and add a start script to package.json so you can comfortably run the code:

{
  "name": "hello-world",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "",
  "main": "index.js",
  "scripts": {
    "test": "echo "Error: no test specified" && exit 1",
    "start": "ts-node index.ts"
  },
  "keywords": [],
  "author": "",
  "license": "ISC",
  "dependencies": {
    "graphql": "^14.0.2",
    "prisma-client-lib": "^1.20.0"
  },
  "devDependencies": {
    "ts-node": "^7.0.1",
    "typescript": "^3.1.6"
  }
}
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Now execute the script with the following command:

npm run start
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Whenever you run the script with that command, a new user record is created in the demo database (because of the call to createUser).

Feel free to play around with the Prisma client API and try out some of the following operations by adding the following code snippets to the file (at the end of the main function) and re-executing the script:

const user = await prisma.user({ id: '__USER_ID__' })
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In some snippets, you need to replace the __USER__ID__ placeholder with the ID of an actual user.