Databases ​

In this section, we will cover the database usage in the development environment with all details.

• You will learn
• How Axe API uses databases?
• How to configure a database for dev-kit?
• How to execute database migrations?

Getting started ​

The dev-kit uses SQLite as the default database when you installed it. But it doesn't mean that you have to use SQLite all the time. Sometimes you going to need other databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.

In this tutorial, we are going to explain how you can manage databases while you are developing new features or fixing a bug on Axe API.

Configuration ​

Axe API uses Knex.js as the database library. That's why we have a configuration file in the dev-kit folder, which is called knexfile.js. You can select different database servers, databases, users, etc by changing that configuration file.

For example' you should apply the folowing changes if you want to work with MySQL;

module.exports = {
  client: "mysql",
  connection: {
    host: process.env.DB_HOST || "localhost",
    user: process.env.DB_USER || "user",
    password: process.env.DB_PASSWORD || "password",
    database: "my_db",
  },
  pool: {
    min: 2,
    max: 10,
  },
  migrations: {
    tableName: "knex_migrations",
  },
};

Migrations ​

You should execute the migrations to build a database schema on the database. To do that, you should;

• Go to dev-api directory (cd dev-api)
• Create a new migration file (knex --esm migrate:make MyFile)
• Change the migration file content like the following example.
• Execute the migration (knex --esm migrate:latest)

You can see here how a migration file looks like;

export const up = function (knex) {
  return knex.schema.createTable("users", function (table) {
    table.increments();
    table.string("name");
    table.string("surname");
    table.string("email").unique();
    table.timestamps();
  });
};

export const down = function (knex) {
  return knex.schema.dropTable("users");
};

Next steps ​

In this section, we've explained how you can manage your development database.

In the following section, we are going to talk about how you can test your changes in your development environment.