Setting Up Your Database

Before you can continue working on your dashboard, you'll need some data. In this chapter, you'll be setting up a PostgreSQL database from one of Vercel's marketplace integrations. If you're already familiar with PostgreSQL and would prefer to use your own database provider, you can skip this chapter and set it up on your own. Otherwise, let's continue!

In this chapter...

Here are the topics we’ll cover

Push your project to GitHub.

Set up a Vercel account and link your GitHub repo for instant previews and deployments.

Create and link your project to a Postgres database.

Seed the database with initial data.

Create a GitHub repository

To start, let's push your repository to Github if you haven't done so already. This will make it easier to set up your database and deploy.

If you need help setting up your repository, take a look at this guide on GitHub.

Good to know:

• You can also use other Git provider like GitLab or Bitbucket.
• If you're new to GitHub, we recommend the GitHub Desktop App for a simplified development workflow.

Create a Vercel account

Visit vercel.com/signup to create an account. Choose the free "hobby" plan. Select Continue with GitHub to connect your GitHub and Vercel accounts.

Connect and deploy your project

Next, you'll be taken to this screen where you can select and import the GitHub repository you've just created:

Name your project and click Deploy.

Hooray! 🎉 Your project is now deployed.

By connecting your GitHub repository, whenever you push changes to your main branch, Vercel will automatically redeploy your application with no configuration needed. When opening pull requests, you'll also have instant previews which allow you to catch deployment errors early and share a preview of your project with team members for feedback.

Create a Postgres database

Next, to set up a database, click Continue to Dashboard and select the Storage tab from your project dashboard. Select Create Database. Depending on when your Vercel account was created, you may see the following options: Postgres (Powered by Neon), Neon, or Supabase. Choose your preferred provider and click Continue.

Accept the terms and choose your region and plan if required. The default region for all Vercel projects is Washington D.C (iad1), and we recommend choosing this if available to reduce latency for data requests.

Once connected, navigate to the .env.local tab, click Show secret and Copy Snippet. Make sure you reveal the secrets before copying them.

Navigate to your code editor and rename the .env.example file to .env. Paste in the copied contents from Vercel.

Important: Go to your .gitignore file and make sure .env is in the ignored files to prevent your database secrets from being exposed when you push to GitHub.

Finally, run pnpm i @vercel/postgres in your terminal to install the Vercel Postgres SDK.

Seed your database

Now that your database has been created, let's seed it with some initial data.

Inside of /app, there's a folder called seed. Uncomment this file. This folder contains a Next.js Route Handler, called route.ts, that will be used to seed your database. This creates a server-side endpoint that you can access in the browser to start populating your database.

Don't worry if you don't understand everything the code is doing, but to give you an overview, the script uses SQL to create the tables, and the data from placeholder-data.ts file to populate them after they've been created.

Ensure your local development server is running with pnpm run dev and navigate to localhost:3000/seed in your browser. When finished, you will see a message "Database seeded successfully" in the browser. Once completed, you can delete this file.

Troubleshooting:

• Make sure to reveal your database secrets before copying it into your .env file.
• The script uses bcrypt to hash the user's password, if bcrypt isn't compatible with your environment, you can update the script to use bcryptjs instead.
• If you run into any issues while seeding your database and want to run the script again, you can drop any existing tables by running DROP TABLE tablename in your database query interface. See the executing queries section below for more details. But be careful, this command will delete the tables and all their data. It's ok to do this with your example app since you're working with placeholder data, but you shouldn't run this command in a production app.
• If you continue to experience issues while seeding your Vercel Postgres database, please open a discussion on GitHub.

Executing queries

Let's execute a query to make sure everything is working as expected. We'll use another Router Handler, query/route.ts, to query the database. Inside this file, you'll find a listInvoices() function that has the following SQL query.

SELECT invoices.amount, customers.name
FROM invoices
JOIN customers ON invoices.customer_id = customers.id
WHERE invoices.amount = 666;

Uncomment the file and navigate to localhost:3000/query in your browser. You should see that an invoice amount and name is returned.