@vercel/postgres

A client that works with Vercel Postgres.

Quick Start

Note: If you want to use an ORM instead of writing your own queries, see @vercel/postgres-kysely.

Install

pnpm install @vercel/postgres

Importing

// Don't need any custom config?:
import { sql } from '@vercel/postgres';
// `sql` is already set up and ready to go; no further action needed

// Need to customize your config?:
import { createPool } from '@vercel/postgres';
const pool = createPool({
  /* config */
});

// Need a single client?:
import { createClient } from '@vercel/postgres';
const client = createClient({
  /* config */
});

Querying

// no-config
import { sql } from '@vercel/postgres';

const id = 100;

// A one-shot query
const { rows } = await sql`SELECT * FROM users WHERE id = ${userId};`;

// Multiple queries on the same connection (improves performance)
// warning: Do not share clients across requests and be sure to release them!
const client = await sql.connect();
const { rows } = await client.sql`SELECT * FROM users WHERE id = ${userId};`;
await client.sql`UPDATE users SET status = 'satisfied' WHERE id = ${userId};`;
client.release();

The sql import in the query above is just a modified Pool object (that's why you can call it). If you're running a custom config with createPool, the same functionality is available as pool.sql.

To specify a connection string:

import { createPool } from '@vercel/postgres';

const pool = createPool({
  connectionString: process.env.SOME_POSTGRES_CONNECTION_STRING,
});

const likes = 100;
const { rows, fields } =
  await pool.sql`SELECT * FROM posts WHERE likes > ${likes};`;

A note on edge environments

In edge environments, IO connections cannot be reused between requests. To allow your Pools to continue to function, we set maxUses to 1 when running on the edge (otherwise the Pool might hold on to a Client used in one request and try to use it again in another). Unfortunately, this means the Pool also can't reuse the connection within the request. For this reason, if you're firing more than one database query to serve a single request in your app, we recommend obtaining a Client from Pool.connect, using that Client to query the database, and then releasing it.

Get the connection url

If you just want the connection URL, you can call postgresConnectionString(type: 'pool' | 'direct'): string;. This will read from your environment variables. For the pool type, it will look for the POSTGRES_URL environment variables. For the direct type, it will look for the POSTGRES_URL_NON_POOLING environment variables.

import { postgresConnectionString } from '@vercel/postgres';

const pooledConnectionString = postgresConnectionString('pool');
const directConnectionString = postgresConnectionString('direct');

Connection Config

When using the createClient or createPool functions, you can pass in additional options alongside the connection string that conforms to VercelPostgresClientConfig or VercelPostgresPoolConfig.

Documentation

The @vercel/postgres package uses the pg package. For more detailed documentation, checkout node-postgres.

A note for Vite users

@vercel/postgres reads database credentials from the environment variables on process.env. In general, process.env is automatically populated from your .env file during development, which is created when you run vc env pull. However, Vite does not expose the .env variables on process.env.

You can fix this in one of following two ways:

1. You can populate process.env yourself using something like dotenv-expand:

pnpm install --save-dev dotenv dotenv-expand

// vite.config.js
import dotenvExpand from 'dotenv-expand';
import { loadEnv, defineConfig } from 'vite';

export default defineConfig(({ mode }) => {
  // This check is important!
  if (mode === 'development') {
    const env = loadEnv(mode, process.cwd(), '');
    dotenvExpand.expand({ parsed: env });
  }

  return {
    ...
  };
});

2. You can provide the credentials explicitly, instead of relying on a zero-config setup. For example, this is how you could create a client in SvelteKit, which makes private environment variables available via $env/static/private:

import { createPool } from '@vercel/postgres';
+ import { POSTGRES_URL } from '$env/static/private';

import { createPool } from '@vercel/postgres';
const pool = createPool({
-  /* config */
+  connectionString: POSTGRES_URL
});