Quickstart: create a managed PostgreSQL database and connect

1. Create the database

1. Sign up, verify your email and add a card.
2. Choose Create a database.
3. Pick a region (EU, US or Asia). Your database, its standby and its backups stay there. Not sure which is closest? Enter your server's public IP address and our servers in each region ping it. See Regions and data residency.
4. Pick a plan. High-availability plans run on two servers in different sites; single-node plans on one; Dev is a small single-node plan for development and testing. See Plans, resizing and storage limits.
5. Give it a name and, optionally, an environment label. A database labelled production starts with deletion protection on.

While the database is being set up, its page shows the setup phases and anything it is retrying. It is ready when its status is live: the servers are running, the hostname resolves and the first backup is done.

2. Copy the connection string

The database page shows one connection string:

postgresql://u_k7m2q9:[email protected]:20017/app?sslmode=verify-full

• The user is the database's owner role, u_<id>, and the database is app.
• The hostname stays the same for the life of the database, including after a failover or a plan change.
• The password is shown once, right after the database is created. Store it in your secrets manager. If you lose it, reset it on the database page: a new password is generated and the old one stops working immediately.

High-availability plans also show a read replica connection string on a second port. It reads from the standby, which can be slightly behind the primary, and rejects writes.

3. Connect

The examples read the connection string from the DATABASE_URL environment variable, so the password stays out of your code. TLS is verified against the public certificate authorities your system already trusts.

DATABASE_URL=postgresql://u_k7m2q9:[email protected]:20017/app?sslmode=verify-full
# for drivers that take the password separately (JDBC)
DATABASE_PASSWORD=YOUR_PASSWORD

psql "postgresql://u_k7m2q9:[email protected]:20017/app?sslmode=verify-full&sslrootcert=system"

# pip install "psycopg[binary]"
import os
import psycopg

# sslrootcert="system": verify the server against your system's certificate authorities
with psycopg.connect(os.environ["DATABASE_URL"], sslrootcert="system") as conn:
    print(conn.execute("select version()").fetchone()[0])

// npm install pg
import pg from "pg";

const client = new pg.Client({ connectionString: process.env.DATABASE_URL });
await client.connect();
const { rows } = await client.query("select version()");
console.log(rows[0].version);
await client.end();

// go get github.com/jackc/pgx/v5
package main

import (
	"context"
	"fmt"
	"os"

	"github.com/jackc/pgx/v5"
)

func main() {
	ctx := context.Background()
	conn, err := pgx.Connect(ctx, os.Getenv("DATABASE_URL"))
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	defer conn.Close(ctx)
	var v string
	conn.QueryRow(ctx, "select version()").Scan(&v)
	fmt.Println(v)
}

// org.postgresql:postgresql
import java.sql.*;

public class Main {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws SQLException {
        String url = "jdbc:postgresql://k7m2q9.db.electradb.com:20017/app?sslmode=verify-full&sslfactory=org.postgresql.ssl.DefaultJavaSSLFactory";
        try (Connection c = DriverManager.getConnection(url, "u_k7m2q9", System.getenv("DATABASE_PASSWORD"))) {
            ResultSet r = c.createStatement().executeQuery("select version()");
            r.next();
            System.out.println(r.getString(1));
        }
    }
}

4. Next steps

• Limit who can connect with the IP allowlist.
• Learn how to restore to a point in time.
• Choose a replication mode on high-availability plans.
• Automate all of this with the API: create an API key under API keys and send it as Authorization: Bearer dbk_… to /api/v1.