Reading Time: 2 minutes

A simple example about how to connect to a PostgreSQL database using Node.js

Let’s create a folder to host our example. Open a terminal and type:

      
mkdir node-js-postgresql
 
    

Enter to the folder

      
cd node-js-postgresql
 
    

Use package.json generator. Follow the steps

      
npm init
npm install
 
    

Install pg module in our project

      
npm install pg --save
 
    

In case you have a database url connection you will have to parse it. There’s a module to parse such as url. Example url:

      
postgres://hfbwxykfdgkurg:a75568307daad4b1432b5d173719ba7ba908ea06e7d0ebe8bf7bd434eb655547@ec2-108-21-167-137.compute-1.amazonaws.com:5432/w5tftigeor6odh
 
    

Install the module

      
npm install parse-database-url --save
 
    

Create a file called db_helper.js

      
const parseDbUrl = require("parse-database-url");
 
//we have our connection url in an environment config variable. Each developer will have his own
//a connection url will look like this:
//postgres://hfbwxykfdgkurg:a75568307daad4wb1432b5d173719bae7ba908ea06e7d0ebef8bf7bd434eb655547@ec2-108-21-167-137.compute-1.amazonaws.com:5432/w5tftigeor6odh
const dbConfig = parseDbUrl(process.env.DATABASE_URL);
const Pool = require("pg").Pool;
const pool = new Pool({
    user: dbConfig.user,
    host: dbConfig.host,
    database: dbConfig.database,
    password: dbConfig.password,
    port: dbConfig.port,
    ssl: true,
});
 
module.exports.execute = pool;
      
    

In the line number 6 we have a call to a configuration environment variable

      
process.env.DATABASE_URL
 
    

It’s a good way to avoid versioning sensitive data like a database connection or other credentials. To run this example you can just hard-code it

Create a file called index.js

      
const dbHelper = require("./db_helper");
 
//deal with the promise
findUserById(1234)
    .then(user => {
        console.info(user);
    })
    .catch(error => {
        console.error(error);
    });
 
/**
 *
 * @param userId
 * @returns a Promise with the user row for the given id
 * @throws error if there's a connection issue or if the user was not found by the id
 */
async function findUserById(userId) {
    const query = "SELECT * FROM users WHERE id = $1 LIMIT 1";
    const bindings = [userId];
    const result = await dbHelper.execute.query(query, bindings);
    if (result.rows.length > 0) {
        return result.rows[0];
    } else {
        throw Error("User not found by id " + userId);
    }
}

 
    

Run the example

      
node index.js
 
    

That’s it 🙂

Full source code: https://github.com/andrescanavesi/node-js-postgresql