You install Kysely in a project using:

npm i kysely

Depending on the kind of database you’ll use (Postgres, MySQL, SQLite), you need to install another library.

In our case we’ll use Postgres, so we also need:

npm i pg

Now in your project create a db.ts (or db.js) file in the src folder, and add:

import { Kysely, PostgresDialect } from 'kysely'

import pg from 'pg'
const { Pool } = pg

const DATABASE_URL = process.env.DATABASE_URL

let dialect

try {
  dialect = new PostgresDialect({
    pool: new Pool({
      connectionString: DATABASE_URL
    }),
  })
} catch (e) {
  console.error(e)
}

export const db = new Kysely({
  dialect,
})

We get the DATABASE_URL environment variable using process.env.DATABASE_URL, which is what we do in Hono.

It might differ on other frameworks, for example in Astro we do import.meta.env.DATABASE_URL.

You need to add this to the .env file if you’re working locally (and remember, you never push this “secrets file” to Git - add this to .gitignore).

Something like this, which represents the connection URL to the database (yours will differ depending on the setup):

DATABASE_URL=postgresql://[email protected]/database-name

Now in any file we can import the db object, which is the Kysely instance:

import { db } from './db'

and we can use it to interact with the database, running queries.

We’ll see how in the next lesson.

Lessons in this unit: