How To Seed Your Database With Prisma

Create your script

The logic of your seed script (e.g. create user data) is contained within a main function. Once your script is finished executing, the prisma client is terminated in the finally method. Simultaneously, we keep an eye 👀 out for any potential errors using the catch method (e.g. due to an incorrect query).

const prisma = new PrismaClient()

async function main() {
  // Perform database queries here
  // await prisma.user.create(...)
}

main()
  .catch(error => {
    console.error(error)
    process.exit(1)
  })
  .finally(async () => {
    await prisma.$disconnect()
  })

Run your script

To run your script, you will first need to have the following dependencies installed.

# NPM
npm install -D typescript ts-node @types/node

# Yarn
yarn add --dev typescript ts-node @types/node

Prisma expects any seed scripts to be executed via the seed field in the prisma key of your package.json file.

{
  "name": "my-blog",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "prisma": {
    "seed": "ts-node <path to file>/seed.ts"
  },
  "devDependencies": {
    "@types/node": "18.7.12",
    "ts-node": "^10.9.1",
    "typescript": "4.8.0"
  }
}

You may then manually 💻 execute your script with:

# NPM
npx prisma db seed

# Yarn
yarn prisma db seed

Be aware that your seed script is run automatically with prisma migrate dev and prisma migrate reset. If you wish this not to happen, append --skip-seed.

Script execution in Next.js

If you are running, for example, a Next.js project, you will need to adjust your prisma seed field to include a compiler.

"prisma": {
   "seed": "ts-node --compiler-options {\"module\":\"CommonJS\"} <path to file>/seed.ts"
}