Learn how to deploy a Node.js server that uses Prisma ORM to Render

This guide explains how to deploy a Node.js server that uses Prisma ORM and PostgreSQL to Render.

Questions answered in this page

• How to deploy Prisma apps on Render?
• How to run migrations before start?
• What Render settings are recommended?

The Prisma Render deployment example contains an Express.js application with REST endpoints and a simple frontend. This app uses Prisma Client to fetch, create, and delete records from its database.

Render is a cloud application platform that lets developers easily deploy and scale full-stack applications. For this example, it's helpful to know:

• Render lets you deploy long-running, "serverful" full-stack applications. You can configure Render services to autoscale based on CPU and/or memory usage. This is one of several deployment paradigms you can choose from.

• Render natively supports common runtimes, including Node.js and Bun. In this guide, we'll use the Node.js runtime.

• Render integrates with Git repos for automatic deployments upon commits. You can deploy to Render from GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket. In this guide, we'll deploy from a Git repository.

• Sign up for a Render account

Download the example code to your local machine.

curl https://codeload.github.com/prisma/prisma-examples/tar.gz/latest | tar -xz --strip=2 prisma-examples-latest/deployment-platforms/render
cd render

Before we deploy the app, let's take a look at the example code.

Web application

The logic for the Express app is in two files:

• src/index.js: The API. The endpoints use Prisma Client to fetch, create, and delete data from the database.
• public/index.html: The web frontend. The frontend calls a few of the API endpoints.

Prisma schema and migrations

The Prisma components of this app are in two files:

• prisma/schema.prisma: The data model of this app. This example defines two models, User and Post. The format of this file follows the Prisma schema.
• prisma/migrations/<migration name>/migration.sql: The SQL commands that construct this schema in a PostgreSQL database. You can auto-generate migration files like this one by running prisma migrate dev.

Render Blueprint

The render.yaml file is a Render blueprint. Blueprints are Render's Infrastructure as Code format. You can use a Blueprint to programmatically create and modify services on Render.

A render.yaml defines the services that will be spun up on Render by a Blueprint. In this render.yaml, we see:

• A web service that uses a Node runtime: This is the Express app.
• A PostgreSQL database: This is the database that the Express app uses.

The format of this file follows the Blueprint specification.

How Render deploys work with Prisma Migrate

In general, you want all your database migrations to run before your web app is started. Otherwise, the app may hit errors when it queries a database that doesn't have the expected tables and rows.

You can use the Pre-Deploy Command setting in a Render deploy to run any commands, such as database migrations, before the app is started.

For more details about the Pre-Deploy Command, see Render's deploy guide.

In our example code, the render.yaml shows the web service's build command, pre-deploy command, and start command. Notably, npx prisma migrate deploy (the pre-deploy command) will run before npm run start (the start command).

1. Initialize your Git repository

1. Download the example code to your local machine.
2. Create a new Git repository on GitHub, GitLab, or BitBucket.
3. Upload the example code to your new repository.

2. Deploy manually

1. In the Render Dashboard, click New > PostgreSQL. Provide a database name, and select a plan. (The Free plan works for this demo.)
2. After your database is ready, look up its internal URL.
3. In the Render Dashboard, click New > Web Service and connect the Git repository that contains the example code.
4. Provide the following values during service creation:

That’s it. Your web service will be live at its onrender.com URL as soon as the build finishes.

3. (optional) Deploy with Infrastructure as Code

You can also deploy the example using the Render Blueprint. Follow Render's [Blueprint setup guide] and use the render.yaml in the example.

Prisma ORM includes a framework for seeding the database with starter data. In our example, prisma/seed.js defines some test users and posts.

To add these users to the database, we can either:

1. Add the seed script to our Pre-Deploy Command, or
2. Manually run the command on our server via an SSH shell

Method 1: Pre-Deploy Command

If you manually deployed your Render services:

1. In the Render dashboard, navigate to your web service.
2. Select Settings.
3. Set the Pre-Deploy Command to: npx prisma migrate deploy; npx prisma db seed

If you deployed your Render services using the Blueprint:

1. In your render.yaml file, change the preDeployCommand to: npx prisma migrate deploy; npx prisma db seed
2. Commit the change to your Git repo.

Method 2: SSH

Render allows you to SSH into your web service.

1. Follow Render's SSH guide to connect to your server.
2. In the shell, run: npx prisma db seed