In today's fast-paced web development world, it's important to have a tool that can handle your database efficiently. This is where Prisma ORM comes in - it's a type-safe database ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) that simplifies database access and management. In this article, we will explore how to use Prisma ORM in Next.js, a popular React-based server-side rendering framework.

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Table of Contents:

1. Prerequisites
2. Getting Started
3. Defining a Data Model
4. Using the Prisma Client
5. Conclusion

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Prerequisites

To follow along with this tutorial, you should have a basic understanding of Next.js, JavaScript, and Node.js. You will also need to have Node.js and npm installed on your machine.

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Getting Started

First, we need to create a Next.js project. Open your terminal and run the following commands:

npx create-next-app prisma-next
cd prisma-next

Next, we need to install Prisma and the Prisma client. In your terminal, run:

npm install prisma
npm install @prisma/client

Now, we can initialize a Prisma schema. In your terminal, run:

This will create a prisma directory in your project with a schema.prisma file.

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Defining a Data Model

In the schema.prisma file, we can define our data model. For example, let's say we want to create a User model with a name and email field. We can define this as follows:

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

model User {
  id    Int     @id @default(autoincrement())
  name  String
  email String  @unique
}

This defines our data model and tells Prisma how to map it to our database.

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Using the Prisma Client

Next, we need to use the Prisma client to interact with our database. In your Next.js project, create a new file called db.js in the root directory. In this file, we will create a new instance of the Prisma client:

const { PrismaClient } = require('@prisma/client')

const prisma = new PrismaClient()

module.exports = {
  prisma,
}

Now we can use this prisma instance to interact with our database. For example, to create a new user, we can define a new API route in Next.js:

import { prisma } from '../../db'

export default async function handler(req, res) {
  const { name, email } = req.body

  const user = await prisma.user.create({
    data: {
      name,
      email,
    },
  })

  res.status(200).json(user)
}

In this example, we are using the prisma instance to create a new user in the database and returning the newly created user as a JSON response.

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Conclusion

In this article, we have explored how to use Prisma ORM in Next.js to interact with a database. We learned how to define a data model using Prisma schema, and how to use the Prisma client to interact with our database in Next.js. With Prisma, database management becomes easier and more efficient.