Prisma, PlanetScale, TypeScript

Up and Running with Prisma and PlanetScale

11 Lessons

Ryan Chenkie

Full Stack Instructor

PlanetScale is one of the fastest-growing and most compelling database platforms on the market. It's especially well-suited to serverless applications as it relieves developers of worries about connection limits, allowing for almost unlimited connections. PlanetScale also provides schema change management through branching and deploy requests and allows for easy reversions when things go wrong. Prisma works especially well with PlanetScale but it does come with a couple gotchas. In this course, we look at all of the necessary steps to get Prisma working with a PlanetScale database. We look at how to get PlanetScale set up in the first place, how to connect to it from our development environments, and we see all the necessary configuration to get Prisma to talk to PlanetScale.

Prisma and PlanetScale

What is PlanetScale?

Install the PlanetScale CLI

Create a PlanetScale Database

Connect to a PlanetScale Database

Create a Node and Prisma Backend

Create a Prisma Schema

Create Test Data Using Faker

Update the Schema and Open a Deploy Request

How to Handle Code Changes After Schema Updates

How to Handle Connection Strings

Switch from SQLite to PlanetScale

Prisma and PlanetScale

What is PlanetScale?

PlanetScale offers a unique way for developers to host and manage a MySQL-compatible database that offers virtually unlimited connections and comes with a ton of features to make our lives easier. In this lesson, we look at what PlanetScale is all about and how to sign up for an account.

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Install the PlanetScale CLI

The PlanetScale CLI allows us to manage almost everything from the command line. In this lesson, we see how to install it.

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Create a PlanetScale Database

To get Prisma wired up to PlanetScale, we need to start by getting a database up and running. In this lesson, we see how to create a new PlanetScale database from the dashboard.

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Connect to a PlanetScale Database

PlanetScale provides a few different ways for us to connect to our databases. In this lesson, we see how to use the recommend best practice for connecting to a database in a local development environment.

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Create a Node and Prisma Backend

In this lesson, we create a simple Node.js app that uses Prisma and see how to connect to our PlanetScale database.

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Create a Prisma Schema

To get some data in our PlanetScale database, we first need to start with a schema. In this lesson, we'll add a simple schema to our app which deals with customers and invoices.

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Create Test Data Using Faker

The best way to make sure our database is working properly is to add some data to it. In this lesson, we use Faker to add some fake data and then inspect it using Prisma Studio.

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Update the Schema and Open a Deploy Request

The way we change our data schema is different when we use PlanetScale. We branch off of main, make adjustments, and then merge those changes in when we're satisfied. In this lesson, we see all the necessary steps to do just that.

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How to Handle Code Changes After Schema Updates

When we use Prisma with PlanetScale, we don't use Prisma's migrate feature. This means that we need to consider the ramifications of our app code being out of sync with our data model. In this lesson, we see how to use the expand and contract pattern to make this simpler to manage.

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How to Handle Connection Strings

When we use connection strings that PlanetScale provides, we sometimes need to explicitly specify the root certificate path on our machines. In this lesson, we see how to do that from our Node app.

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Switch from SQLite to PlanetScale

In the Getting Started with Prisma course, we use a simple SQLite database. In this lesson, we see how to change that existing database out for a PlanetScale database. It turns out that it's fairly simple to do.

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