Hapi Postgres Connection (for Hapi v.19)

hapi-postgres-connection

Creates a PostgreSQL Connection available anywhere in your Hapi application.

Why?

You are building a PostgreSQL-backed Hapi.js Application but don't want to be initialising a connection to Postgres in your route handler because it's slow and can lead to interesting errors ... so instead, you spend 1 minute to include a tiny, tried & tested plugin that makes Postgres available in all your route handlers.

Got any questions? ask!! https://github.com/dwyl/hapi-postgres-connection/issues

What?

This Hapi Plugin creates a Connection to PostgreSQL when your server starts up and makes it available anywhere in your app's route handlers via request.pg.client.

When you shut down your server (e.g. the server.stop in your tests) the connection is closed for you.

One Dependency: `node-postgres` always up-to-date

This plugin uses https://github.com/brianc/node-postgres the most popular (actively maintained) node PostgreSQL Client.

How?

1. Download/Install from NPM or Yarn

npm install hapi-postgres-connection --save

yarn add hapi-postgres-connection

2. Initialize the plugin in your Hapi Server

in your server:

const HapiPostgresConnection = require('hapi-postgres-connection');
 
await server.register({
  plugin: HapiPostgresConnection
});

Now all your route handlers have access to Postgres via: request.pg.client

You also can also access Postgres through the getCon method on the Hapi Postgres Connection module: const pg = require('hapi-postgres-connection').getCon();

This method may be useful when do not have access to the request object.

3. Using Postgres Client in your Route Handler

server.route({
  method: 'GET',
  path: '/',
  handler: async function(request, h) {
    let email = 'test@test.net';
    let select = `SELECT * FROM people WHERE ${email}`;
 
    try {
      const result = await request.pg.client.query(insertData);
      console.log(result);
      return h.response(result.rows[0]);
    } catch (err) {
      console.log(err);
    }
  }
});

Required/Expected Environment Variable: `DATABASE_URL`

The plugin expects (requires) that you have an Environment Variable set for the Postgres Connection URL: DATABASE_URL in the format: postgres://username:password@localhost/database

This is the default used by Heroku so we figured it made sense to keep it.

If you are unsure how to set the Environment Variable or why this is a good idea
(hard-coding values in your app is a really bad idea...)
please see: https://github.com/dwyl/learn-environment-variables

Optional Environment Variable: `DATABASE_SSL`

If your database connection requires the use of SSL, you can set DATABASE_SSL environment variable to true and the pool connection will be done accordingly. This is required (for example) by databases hosted on [Heroku] (https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-postgresql#heroku-postgres-ssl).

Q: Don't We need to Close the Postgres Connection?

A: No! The plugin handles closing the connection for you!

Implementation Detail

To run the tests locally you will need to have a running instance of PostgreSQL with a database called test available.

Then set your DATABASE_URL Environment Variable, on my localhost its:

export DATABASE_URL=postgres://postgres:@localhost/test

(the default postgres user does not have a password on localhost)

Motivation?

We were doing postgres connections the hard way in our app(s) ... We knew there had to be a better way After a few hours of googling and code-reviewing we decided to write our own little plugin to simplify things.