Author: Lewis King
Date: September 16, 2019
Originally posted on the Fauna blog.

We’re excited to announce the FaunaDB Add-on for Netlify, which empowers users to create a fully-featured, globally-distributed data back-end for their applications within seconds.

This integration allows users to instantly add FaunaDB to any JAMstack project managed with Netlify, and to manage the database instance via FaunaDB Console.

What is Netlify?

Netlify is a unified platform that makes it easy to deploy, scale, and maintain JAMstack websites and apps. Continuous deployment, hosting, serverless functions, forms, and identity, and more are all easy to add to your projects via Netlify’s dashboard and command line tools. Sites on Netlify are extremely fast and secure—the code you deploy gets prebuilt and globally distributed across multiple content delivery networks on multiple clouds to be as close to end users as possible. Netlify replaces servers & maintenance with an automated, productive workflow built for developers.

Add-on Capabilities

The FaunaDB Add-on for Netlify enables users to seamlessly plug in a globally distributed datastore into their applications with an instant GraphQL backend for Netlify apps, without any provisioning. They can also associate databases with their FaunaDB account so that they can manage them within FaunaDB Console.

Once users have a Netlify account, creating a database within your site can be done in using a few simple commands:

npm i netlify-cli -g

mkdir my_project

cd my_project

netlify init

This installs the Netlify CLI tools, and create and initialize a Netlify project.

netlify addons:create fauna

This command creates a FaunaDB instance for your new site.

netlify addons:auth fauna

This prompts you to sign up with FaunaDB, or login if you already have an account. Once logged in, you are prompted to name your database and import it into your account. This allows you to interact with your database directly using the FaunaDB Console.

The complete documentation for this add-on can be found here.

A New Login Option

Users can now also create an account and login to FaunaDB with their Netlify account credentials using OAuth:

Benefits for users of Netlify and FaunaDB

The FaunaDB Add-on for Netlify extends the productivity of the serverless experience to application data, something that has been in strong demand within the JAMstack community. Serverless data eliminates all database operations, which has until now been a cumbersome, error-prone and manual effort for developers, and one that required significant upfront planning.

FaunaDB is the only serverless cloud database with a direct Add-on for Netlify, making it the perfect choice for developers who want to build stateful apps on Netlify. Databases created via the Add-on are available for use instantly via FaunaDB’s native GraphQL API.

Globally distributed data ensures that data is close to where your users are, thus enabling a snappy user experience for apps deployed on Netlify’s global fabric. Database instances created with this Add-on can be managed via FaunaDB Console as well as FaunaDB Shell for hassle-free use.

Conclusion

With this Add-on, anyone using FaunaDB and Netlify can come up with an idea and launch it immediately, just by focusing on the frontend. Netlify users can use FaunaDB as a stateful component of their apps with ease, and avail themselves of our generous free tier.

Please visit the FaunaDB documentation to learn more. And please let us know what you think so that we can incorporate your feedback into a future release.

What other integrations would you like to see implemented in FaunaDB? Please reach out to me on LinkedIn and our Community Slack and describe any other features that would make FaunaDB and Netlify an obvious choice for your next project.