Switch to Drizzle

Drizzle is a brilliant, type-safe ORM growing quickly in popularity. If you want to switch to Drizzle, you have two options:

1. Keep Prisma and add the Drizzle API to the Prisma client. Drizzle have a great guide on how to do this.
2. Go all-in and switch to Drizzle.

Here, we’ll assume you have a working Neon database and cover the second option.

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1. Swap out the required dependencies in @repo/database

Uninstall the existing dependencies…

pnpm remove @prisma/adapter-neon @prisma/client prisma --filter @repo/database

…and install the new ones:

pnpm add drizzle-orm --filter @repo/database
pnpm add -D drizzle-kit --filter @repo/database

​

2. Update the database connection code

Delete everything in @repo/database/index.ts and replace it with the following:

import 'server-only';

import { drizzle } from 'drizzle-orm/neon-http';
import { neon } from '@neondatabase/serverless';
import { env } from '@repo/env';

const client = neon(env.DATABASE_URL);

export const database = drizzle({ client });

​

3. Create a drizzle.config.ts file

Next we’ll create a Drizzle configuration file, used by Drizzle Kit and contains all the information about your database connection, migration folder and schema files. Create a drizzle.config.ts file in the packages/database directory with the following contents:

import { defineConfig } from 'drizzle-kit';
import { env } from '@repo/env';

export default defineConfig({
  schema: './schema.ts',
  out: './',
  dialect: 'postgresql',
  dbCredentials: {
    url: env.DATABASE_URL,
  },
});

​

4. Generate the schema file

Drizzle uses a schema file to define your database tables. Rather than create one from scratch, we can generate it from the existing database. In the packages/database folder, run the following command to generate the schema file:

npx drizzle-kit pull

This should pull the schema from the database, creating a schema.ts file containing the table definitions and some other files.

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5. Update your queries

Now you can update your queries to use the Drizzle ORM.

For example, here’s how we can update the page query in app/(authenticated)/page.tsx:

import { database } from '@repo/database';
import { page } from '@repo/database/schema';

// ...

const App = async () => {
  const pages = await database.select().from(page);

  // ...
};

export default App;

​

6. Remove Prisma Studio

You can also delete the now unused Prisma Studio app located at apps/studio:

rm -fr apps/studio

​

7. Update the migration script in the root package.json

Change the migration script in the root package.json from Prisma to Drizzle. Update the migrate script to use Drizzle commands:

"scripts": {
  "db:migrate": "cd packages/database && npx drizzle-kit migrate"
  "db:generate": "cd packages/database && npx drizzle-kit generate"
  "db:pull": "cd packages/database && npx drizzle-kit pull"
}