Relational databases
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:
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
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
prismathat contains a file calledschema.prisma, which contains the Prisma schema with your database connection variable and schema models - creates the
.envfile in the root directory of the project, which is used for defining environment variables (such as your database connection)