EdgeDB is a graph-relational database powered by Postgres under the hood. It provides a declarative schema language, migrations system, and object-oriented query language, in addition to supporting raw SQL queries. It solves the object-relational mapping problem at the database layer, eliminating the need for an ORM library in your application code.
First, install EdgeDB if you haven't already.
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.edgedb.com | sh
iwr https://ps1.edgedb.com -useb | iex
Use bun init
to create a fresh project.
mkdir my-edgedb-app
cd my-edgedb-app
bun init -y
We'll use the EdgeDB CLI to initialize an EdgeDB instance for our project. This creates an edgedb.toml
file in our project root.
edgedb project init
No `edgedb.toml` found in `/Users/colinmcd94/Documents/bun/fun/examples/my-edgedb-app` or above
Do you want to initialize a new project? [Y/n]
Y
Specify the name of EdgeDB instance to use with this project [default: my_edgedb_app]:
my_edgedb_app
Checking EdgeDB versions...
Specify the version of EdgeDB to use with this project [default: x.y]:
x.y
┌─────────────────────┬────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Project directory │ /Users/colinmcd94/Documents/bun/fun/examples/my-edgedb-app │
│ Project config │ /Users/colinmcd94/Documents/bun/fun/examples/my-edgedb-app/edgedb.toml │
│ Schema dir (empty) │ /Users/colinmcd94/Documents/bun/fun/examples/my-edgedb-app/dbschema │
│ Installation method │ portable package │
│ Version │ x.y+6d5921b │
│ Instance name │ my_edgedb_app │
└─────────────────────┴────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Version x.y+6d5921b is already downloaded
Initializing EdgeDB instance...
Applying migrations...
Everything is up to date. Revision initial
Project initialized.
To connect to my_edgedb_app, run `edgedb`
To see if the database is running, let's open a REPL and run a simple query.
Then run \quit
to exit the REPL.
edgedb
edgedb> select 1 + 1;
2
edgedb> \quit
With the project initialized, we can define a schema. The edgedb project init
command already created a dbschema/default.esdl
file to contain our schema.
dbschema
├── default.esdl
└── migrations
Open that file and paste the following contents.
module default {
type Movie {
required title: str;
releaseYear: int64;
}
};
Then generate and apply an initial migration.
edgedb migration create
Created /Users/colinmcd94/Documents/bun/fun/examples/my-edgedb-app/dbschema/migrations/00001.edgeql, id: m1uwekrn4ni4qs7ul7hfar4xemm5kkxlpswolcoyqj3xdhweomwjrq
edgedb migrate
Applied m1uwekrn4ni4qs7ul7hfar4xemm5kkxlpswolcoyqj3xdhweomwjrq (00001.edgeql)
With our schema applied, let's execute some queries using EdgeDB's JavaScript client library. We'll install the client library and EdgeDB's codegen CLI, and create a seed.ts
.file.
bun add edgedb
bun add -D @edgedb/generate
touch seed.ts
Paste the following code into seed.ts
.
The client auto-connects to the database. We insert a couple movies using the .execute()
method. We will use EdgeQL's for
expression to turn this bulk insert into a single optimized query.
import { createClient } from "edgedb";
const client = createClient();
const INSERT_MOVIE = `
with movies := <array<tuple<title: str, year: int64>>>$movies
for movie in array_unpack(movies) union (
insert Movie {
title := movie.title,
releaseYear := movie.year,
}
)
`;
const movies = [
{ title: "The Matrix", year: 1999 },
{ title: "The Matrix Reloaded", year: 2003 },
{ title: "The Matrix Revolutions", year: 2003 },
];
await client.execute(INSERT_MOVIE, { movies });
console.log(`Seeding complete.`);
process.exit();
Then run this file with Bun.
bun run seed.ts
Seeding complete.
EdgeDB implements a number of code generation tools for TypeScript. To query our newly seeded database in a typesafe way, we'll use @edgedb/generate
to code-generate the EdgeQL query builder.
bunx @edgedb/generate edgeql-js
Generating query builder...
Detected tsconfig.json, generating TypeScript files.
To override this, use the --target flag.
Run `npx @edgedb/generate --help` for full options.
Introspecting database schema...
Writing files to ./dbschema/edgeql-js
Generation complete! 🤘
Checking the generated query builder into version control
is not recommended. Would you like to update .gitignore to ignore
the query builder directory? The following line will be added:
dbschema/edgeql-js
[y/n] (leave blank for "y")
y
In index.ts
, we can import the generated query builder from ./dbschema/edgeql-js
and write a simple select query.
import { createClient } from "edgedb";
import e from "./dbschema/edgeql-js";
const client = createClient();
const query = e.select(e.Movie, () => ({
title: true,
releaseYear: true,
}));
const results = await query.run(client);
console.log(results);
results; // { title: string, releaseYear: number | null }[]
Running the file with Bun, we can see the list of movies we inserted.
bun run index.ts
[
{
title: "The Matrix",
releaseYear: 1999
}, {
title: "The Matrix Reloaded",
releaseYear: 2003
}, {
title: "The Matrix Revolutions",
releaseYear: 2003
}
]
For complete documentation, refer to the EdgeDB docs.