Set up a local mysql server on Mac with prisma

mysql is one of the most popular dialects of SQL. And prisma is an ORM tool that helps developer interact with database safer and better.

In this post, we will discuss 1. how to set up a local mysql server 2. how to use it with prisma

Set up a local mysql server

Download mysql

Go to mysql website and choose downloads

Choose community version

Choose community server

download the version matching your Operation system

Click No thanks, just start my downloads

Install mysql

Create a new Database

Finish install guide.

Now, open terminal and type

mysql -u root

hit enter, you should see:

Now, create a database with commands CREATE DATABASES, here, we use myFirstDB

Check if database is created successfully: SHOW DATABASES

Now that we have successfully created the database, it's time to connect to it with prisma

Connect to DB with prisma

I assume you have already installed prisma in your project. If not, go to setup-prisma and set it up.

Now, what remains is to connect to our local database.
mysql connection string should be of format:
mysql://USER:PASSWORD@HOST:PORT/DATABASE

3306 is the default port. In our case, we don't have a password, we are using root, connect to db myFirstDB. So the connection string is simply mysql://root@localhost:3306/myFirstDB

In schema, prisma, for datasource, use

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

In .env file, add

DATABASE_URL="mysql://root@localhost:3306/myFirstDB" 

Now you are good to go! To check if it actually works, open the database with sql db visualization tools like Beekeeper Studio:

click import from url and

connect

Now, you see no table, which is expected.

To test, we add a dummy schema to schema.prisma

model User {
  id   String @id @default(cuid())
  name String
}

run

npx prisma migrate dev --name init

in command line, this should generate db schema for you.

Check Beekeeper studio

We have successfully initialized the local database with prisma!

That's all for today, happy hacking!