Improve prototyping speed of Prisma

Prisma is a really great “next-generation” ORM. It enables developers to work with databases effortlessly. It had one downside, and that was an annoying prototyping developer experience.

Single command for schema changes

The 2.10.0 release improved everything with the possibility of running just one single command! Prisma introduced a new prisma db namespace for commands that operate directly against the database.

prisma db push --preview-feature

It greatly improves prototyping speed, because the developer is no longer required to write migrations. The command’s usage is mainly for prototyping and local environments. For production environments, you should use prisma migrate commands to run proper database migrations.

Save and run

If you are using VSCode, we can improve prototyping even more. There is the Save and Run extension, which enables us to run a command on save. You can install this extension through Extensions in VSCode or run this command:

code --install-extension wk-j.save-and-run

Next, you need to add a settings file to your Prisma project to enable Save and Run to work on the schema.prisma file.

.vscode/settings.json
{
  "saveAndRun": {
    "commands": [
      {
        "match": "schema.prisma",
        "cmd": "yarn prisma db push --preview-feature",
        "silent": false
      }
    ]
  }
}

Here you can see the whole flow in action. It deploys a new schema to the database and generates types for PrismaClient.

You can use Save and run with other tools, such as:

• GraphQL code generator - generating code from your GraphQL schema
• Nexus.js - generating code-first GraphQL schema

If you are not using VSCode, you can use Watchman, entr, or any other tool for watching file changes.