Relational databases

JavaScript

MySQL

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:

• Node.js installed on your machine (see system requirements for officially supported versions)
• a MySQL database server running

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 Node.js project and add the Prisma CLI as a development dependency to it:

npm init -y
npm install prisma --save-dev

This creates a package.json with an initial setup for a Node.js app.

info

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 prisma that contains a file called schema.prisma, which contains the Prisma schema with your database connection variable and schema models
• creates the .env file in the root directory of the project, which is used for defining environment variables (such as your database connection)