Prisma

What is Prisma?

Prisma is a next-generation ORM that consists of these tools:

• Prisma Client: Auto-generated and type-safe query builder for Node.js & TypeScript
• Prisma Migrate: Declarative data modeling & migration system
• Prisma Studio: GUI to view and edit data in your database

Prisma Client can be used in any Node.js or TypeScript backend application (including serverless applications and microservices). This can be a REST API, a GraphQL API, a gRPC API, or anything else that needs a database.

The Prisma ORM can also further be extended with these Prisma products:

• Prisma Accelerate: Global database cache with scalable connection pooling
• Prisma Pulse: Real-time database events with type-safe subscriptions
• Prisma Optimize: AI-powered query optimization and performance insights
• Prisma Studio: A visual editor for the data in your database

Getting started

The fastest way to get started with Prisma is by following the Quickstart (5 min).

The Quickstart is based on a preconfigured SQLite database. You can also get started with your own database (PostgreSQL and MySQL) by following one of these guides:

• Add Prisma to an existing project
• Set up a new project with Prisma from scratch

How Prisma works

This section provides a high-level overview of how Prisma works and its most important technical components. For a more thorough introduction, visit the Prisma documentation.

The Prisma schema

Every project that uses a tool from the Prisma toolkit starts with a Prisma schema file. The Prisma schema allows developers to define their application models in an intuitive data modeling language. It also contains the connection to a database and defines a generator:

// Data source
datasource db {
  provider = "postgresql"
  url      = env("DATABASE_URL")
}

// Generator
generator client {
  provider = "prisma-client-js"
}

// Data model
model Post {
  id        Int     @id @default(autoincrement())
  title     String
  content   String?
  published Boolean @default(false)
  author    User?   @relation(fields:  [authorId], references: [id])
  authorId  Int?
}

model User {
  id    Int     @id @default(autoincrement())
  email String  @unique
  name  String?
  posts Post[]
}

In this schema, you configure three things:

• Data source: Specifies your database connection (via an environment variable)
• Generator: Indicates that you want to generate Prisma Client
• Data model: Defines your application models

The Prisma data model

On this page, the focus is on the data model. You can learn more about Data sources and Generators on the respective docs pages.

Functions of Prisma models

The data model is a collection of models. A model has two major functions:

• Represent a table in the underlying database
• Provide the foundation for the queries in the Prisma Client API

Getting a data model

There are two major workflows for "getting" a data model into your Prisma schema:

• Generate the data model from introspecting a database
• Manually writing the data model and mapping it to the database with Prisma Migrate

Once the data model is defined, you can generate Prisma Client which will expose CRUD and more queries for the defined models. If you're using TypeScript, you'll get full type-safety for all queries (even when only retrieving the subsets of a model's fields).

Accessing your database with Prisma Client

Generating Prisma Client

The first step when using Prisma Client is installing its npm package:

npm install @prisma/client

Note that the installation of this package invokes the prisma generate command which reads your Prisma schema and generates the Prisma Client code. The code will be located in node_modules/.prisma/client, which is exported by node_modules/@prisma/client/index.d.ts.

After you change your data model, you'll need to manually re-generate Prisma Client to ensure the code inside node_modules/.prisma/client gets updated:

npx prisma generate

Refer to the documentation for more information about "generating the Prisma client".

Using Prisma Client to send queries to your database

Once the Prisma Client is generated, you can import it in your code and send queries to your database. This is what the setup code looks like.

Import and instantiate Prisma Client

You can import and instantiate Prisma Client as follows:

import { PrismaClient } from '@prisma/client'

const prisma = new PrismaClient()

or

const { PrismaClient } = require('@prisma/client')

const prisma = new PrismaClient()

Now you can start sending queries via the generated Prisma Client API, here are a few sample queries. Note that all Prisma Client queries return plain old JavaScript objects.

Learn more about the available operations in the Prisma Client docs or watch this demo video (2 min).

Retrieve all User records from the database

// Run inside `async` function
const allUsers = await prisma.user.findMany()

Include the posts relation on each returned User object

// Run inside `async` function
const allUsers = await prisma.user.findMany({
  include: { posts: true },
})

Filter all Post records that contain "prisma"

// Run inside `async` function
const filteredPosts = await prisma.post.findMany({
  where: {
    OR: [{ title: { contains: 'prisma' } }, { content: { contains: 'prisma' } }],
  },
})

Create a new User and a new Post record in the same query

// Run inside `async` function
const user = await prisma.user.create({
  data: {
    name: 'Alice',
    email: 'alice@prisma.io',
    posts: {
      create: { title: 'Join us for Prisma Day 2021' },
    },
  },
})

Update an existing Post record

// Run inside `async` function
const post = await prisma.post.update({
  where: { id: 42 },
  data: { published: true },
})

Usage with TypeScript

Note that when using TypeScript, the result of this query will be statically typed so that you can't accidentally access a property that doesn't exist (and any typos are caught at compile-time). Learn more about leveraging Prisma Client's generated types on the Advanced usage of generated types page in the docs.