Database Integration

TheDevSpace boilerplate is built with Prisma ORM, which allows you to connect and interact with different database with a single schema.

By default, TheDevSpace is configured to connect to a local SQLite database. It is good for testing purposes, but I recommend using a production ready database instead.

Create a new database

Postgres is one of the best choices for relational databases. It is open source, popular, and stable.

There are many places you can host a Postgres database, such as Supabase, DigitalOcean, or AWS.

If you plan to host your SaaS on Vercel, you can also create a Postgres database directly from there.

Vercel Database

Connect to the database

Regardless of the platform you choose, you should receive a database connection URL that looks like this:

postgres://default:XXXXXXXXX@ep-xxx-xxxx-xxx-xx-xxxx-xxx.us-east-1.aws.neon.tech/xxxxxdb?sslmode=require

Copy and paste it into the .env file as the value for the variable DATABASE_URL.

And then go to prisma/schema.prisma, and update the datasource section:

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

Notice that the provider has been updated from sqlite into postgresql.

Run database migration

And finally, apply the database migration by running the following command, and you're good to go.

npx prisma migrate dev --name init