How I Separated My Prisma ORM Models: Enhancing Modularity and Scalability

What is Prisma ?

Prisma is an open-source Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) tool that simplifies database access and management for applications. It provides a set of tools and libraries that allow developers to interact with databases using a type-safe and intuitive API.

Prisma acts as a bridge between your application code and the database, abstracting away the complexities of database queries, migrations, and data modeling. It supports various databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, and SQL Server, allowing you to switch between them easily without changing your application code.

Goal

In the world of software development, creating efficient and maintainable code is a constant pursuit. As projects grow in complexity, developers face the challenge of keeping their codebases organized and scalable. When working with Prisma ORM, a powerful database toolkit, structuring and managing models effectively becomes crucial to ensure the long-term success of the project.

In this tutorial, I will explain how I broke away from the one-file prisma model and opted for a modular solution where each model is in its own file:

Steps

After installing PrismaORM (https://www.prisma.io/docs/getting-started/quickstart)

Create a folder called models in your prisma folder, then add our files to it:

mkdir prisma/models
touch prisma/models/config.prisma
touch prisma/models/user.prisma
touch prisma/models/post.prisma

config.prisma

generator client {
  provider = "prisma-client-js"
}

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

user.prisma

model User {
  id        Int      @id @default(autoincrement())
  username  String   @unique
  email     String   @unique
  createdAt DateTime @default(now())
  updatedAt DateTime @updatedAt
  posts     Post[]
}

post.prisma

model Post {
  id        Int      @id @default(autoincrement())
  title     String
  content   String
  createdAt DateTime @default(now())
  updatedAt DateTime @updatedAt
  author    User     @relation(fields: [authorId], references: [id])
  authorId  Int
}

The merging step.

This is where the magic happens, thanks to a single command, we will merge our models into the main schema.prisma file:

cd ./prisma/models && rm -rf ../schema.prisma && cat *.prisma >> ../schema.prisma && cd .. && prisma format

Breakdown of the command:

We change the current dir

cd ./prisma/models

We delete the content of the main file

rm -rf ../schema.prisma 

We add the content of our models to the main file

cat *.prisma >> ../schema.prisma 

We format and fix errors

prisma format 

You can add the following to your package.json so that you can just run npm run gen:schema:

"gen:schema": "cd ./prisma/models && rm -rf ../schema.prisma && cat *.prisma >> ../schema.prisma && cd .. && prisma format",

After this step, just run

npx prisma migrate dev --name init

to apply your changes to your database, and voila ! :)