Generating the Client

Overview

The Prisma client is auto-generated using the prisma generate command of the Prisma CLI. One Prisma client connects to exactly one Prisma service.

prisma generate reads the information that's specified under the generate root property in your service's prisma.yml.

Configuring generate in prisma.yml

The generate root property accepts a list of objects. Each object has two fields:

• generator: The programming language in which the Prisma client should be generated.

  • Possible values: typescript-client, javascript-client, flow-client, go-client.
  • Coming soon: reason.
• output: The path and name of the file in which the Prisma client should be stored.

As an example, consider the following prisma.yml:

datamodel: datamodel.prisma
endpoint: http://localhost:4000

generate:
  - generator: typescript-client
    output: ./prisma-client/

Running prisma generate in the directory where that prisma.yml is located generates a Prisma client in TypeScript and stores it in a file called prisma.ts.

The generator also accepts graphql-schema as a value. This downloads the GraphQL schema for your Prisma API via an introspection query.

Note that you can also reference environment variables in prisma.yml by using the env:-prefix and enclosing them with ${}. For example, if you have an environment variable set that's called MY_SECRET:

datamodel: datamodel.prisma
endpoint: http://localhost:4000

generate:
  - generator: typescript-client
    output: ./prisma-client/

secret: ${env:MY_SECRET}

You can find more info here.

More examples

As generate accepts a list of objects, you might as well generate multiple files at once:

datamodel: datamodel.prisma
endpoint: http://localhost:4466
secret: mysecret42

generate:
  - generator: typescript-client
    output: ./prisma-client-ts/
  - generator: javascript-client
    output: ./prisma-client-js/
  - generator: graphql-schema
    output: ./graphql-schema/

Generated code

Assume the datamodel for a Prisma service is defined as follows:

type Link {
  id: ID! @unique
  createdAt: DateTime!
  description: String!
  url: String!
  postedBy: User
  votes: [Vote!]!
}

type User {
  id: ID! @unique
  name: String!
  email: String! @unique
  password: String!
  links: [Link!]!
  votes: [Vote!]!
}

type Vote {
  id: ID! @unique
  link: Link!
  user: User!
}

You can view what the generated files look like here:

• Prisma client for JavaScript
• Prisma client for TypeScript
• GraphQL schema of Prisma API

The generated Prisma client is already aware of the endpoint and secret that were specified in prisma.yml at the time when the client was generated.