Prisma is an open-source database toolkit. It replaces traditional ORMs and makes database access easy with an auto-generated query builder for TypeScript & Node.js.

prisma

Next.js is a minimalistic framework for server-rendered React applications.

(This collection is still WIP)

Databases are essential for any full-stack applications, but working with them is traditionally very difficult. Prisma is here to change that. It's a powerful database toolkit that helps us think in data itself - not SQL, not classes, just the data we care about in our apps.

In this series, we will learn how to leverage the power of Prisma to automatically generate a type-safe, autocomplete-ready, and efficient query builder, all based on a simple and easy-to-read schema. We will integrate all this good stuff into a Next.js project to complete a simple social network app.

In the end, you will be able to understand how Prisma works, and confidently start using Prisma in your own project.

When we need to spin up a database instance for our new project, installing the database management system directly on our local machine is almost always a bad idea. Luckily, Docker is here to help us practically reduce the complexity of dealing with "missing dependencies" and weird error messages down to zero.

In this lesson, we will learn how to get a PostgreSQL instance running locally with Docker Compose, so we can work on the database integration of our project and test things out with ease. To follow this lesson, you will need to have Docker pre-installed.

postgres

Set up and run a PostgreSQL instance locally with Docker Compose

Prisma makes database access easy with an auto-generated and type-safe query builder.

In this lesson, we will learn how to install all the necessary dependencies and set up Prisma for an existing npm project, with an empty PostgreSQL database running in the background. We will create our first Prisma data model in the schema, and use *Prisma Migrate* to map our data model into the database. 

Finally, we'll generate the *Prisma Client* into our `node_modules` directory, so later we can simply import and use the client tailored to our data models as a normal npm package in the project.

At the time of recording this lesson, *Prisma Migrate* is in an experimental state, so the extra flag `--experimental` is needed to perform the `save` and `up` commands.

Install and Set up Prisma for a New Project

In this lesson, we will write a code snippet which creates a new entry in the database. We will import and use the Prisma Client that we previously generated by running the command `npx prisma generate` to perform this query. 

Thanks to type-safety, we can now directly catch mismatched data field types while we are coding, drastically reducing the chance of having bugs in the code.

Tip - When in doubt, you can always use the key combination `ctrl-space` to invoke the autocomplete feature of VS Code. This is also a huge benefit made possible by Prisma's type-safety, and is super handy for exploring the Prisma Client API.

Create an entry in the database with Prisma Client

Apart from creating entries, it's also very intuitive to read, update, or delete data from the database with Prisma Client.

In this lesson, we will explore the [Prisma Client API](https://www.prisma.io/docs/reference/tools-and-interfaces/prisma-client/crud) for `findMany`, `findOne`, `updateMany`, `deleteMany` and so on.

Notice that since all these methods are tailored to the schema that we defined earlier, VS Code is aware of what is valid and is able to prompt us with helpful autocomplete options, making it much easier to explore the Prisma Client API.

Perform basic database queries (CRUD) with Prisma Client

In this lesson, we will learn how to model data relationships with Prisma Schema. 

We will be using a social network as our example, create data models such as users, posts, likes, comments, and model the relations between them. After this lesson, you should be able to model common relations like *one-to-one* (1:1), *one-to-many* (1:n), *many-to-many* (n:m) with Prisma.

At the time of recording this lesson, *Prisma Migrate* is in an experimental state, so the extra flag `--experimental` is needed to perform the `save` and `up` commands.


Build a full-stack app with Prisma

Xiaoru Li

Free Community Resource

Free Community Resource

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