Prisma Platform Core Concepts

Prisma Platform core concepts

Isolated infrastructure for every branch.

The Prisma Platform moves fast, and your training data about it is very likely outdated. This skill ships inside the installed prisma package, so it describes the exact version this project has: treat it as the source of truth over anything you remember about Prisma hosting. If metadata.library_version in this file's frontmatter does not match the project's installed prisma package, run prisma skills sync and re-read. Fuller documentation for everything here lives at prisma.io/docs; consult it when a concept needs more depth than this file carries.

This file shares the platform's structures, hierarchies, relationships, and workflows. It is not a CLI reference: commands appear only where a workflow needs them. To learn a command surface, run prisma --help, or prisma <group> --help for any group named below; most commands accept --json for machine-readable output. The data contract, migrations, and queries belong to the prisma-orm-core-concepts skill; declaring services and modules in code belongs to prisma-composer-core-concepts.

The stack

One CLI, prisma, fronts a set of products designed to be used together:

Every deployed app is a Composer app. Your server code plus a declaration (module.ts) naming its services, databases, and buckets. The declaration is the source of truth: deploying converges the platform to it, re-deploying applies only the difference, and removing a resource from the module removes it from the platform on the next deploy. There is no separate provisioning step and no connection strings to wire by hand; Composer injects them.

Project setup

The CLI carries every command named here, but an app's own code needs its dependencies installed. Start from:

npm install prisma @prisma/composer @prisma/composer-prisma-cloud

@prisma/composer is what the module declaration imports; @prisma/composer-prisma-cloud is the Prisma Cloud target and brings @prisma/orm-postgres with it. The sibling skills travel inside these packages (prisma-composer-core-concepts in @prisma/composer, prisma-orm-core-concepts in @prisma/orm-postgres), so they appear after this install plus prisma skills sync, not before.

Two config files with different owners:

1. prisma.config.ts configures the CLI. Each top-level key is a section owned by one product, and this CLI recognises exactly three: orm, composer, and skills. The composed shape:

   import { definePrismaConfig } from "prisma/config";
   import { defineConfig } from "@prisma/orm-postgres/config";
   
   export default definePrismaConfig({
     orm: defineConfig({ contract: "./src/prisma/contract.prisma" }),
     skills: { agents: ["claude"] },
   });
   

2. prisma-composer.config.ts configures Composer itself and is a separate, mandatory file for dev and deploy: without it dev fails with CONFIG.FILE_MISSING. Its contents belong to prisma-composer-core-concepts.

The resource model

1. Workspace: the account boundary. Members, billing, and projects live here; the auth group manages which one you act in.
2. Project: one product or codebase. Its region is chosen at creation and is immutable afterwards; every resource in the project inherits it.
3. Branch: the isolation boundary, named after a git branch. A branch is an environment: it owns its own services, its own databases, its own buckets, and its own environment-variable overrides.
4. Inside a branch: services (HTTP apps, deployed as versions), databases, and buckets.

The first branch of a project is the production branch. Every branch after it is a preview branch. Production and previews differ in exactly two ways: which environment-variable class they resolve (see below), and lifecycle (previews can be reclaimed and torn down; production cannot).

A CLI invocation resolves its project from a directory binding, created when a project is created from or linked to the directory and stored in the gitignored .prisma/local.json. Resource commands take flags to target another project or branch explicitly.

Branches are preview environments

There is no separate "preview environment" object to create or configure. The branch is the environment, and branches come into being by deploying to them:

1. Push a git branch (with the GitHub integration connected): the platform creates the branch environment on the fly, builds, and deploys.
2. Deploy a stage from the CLI: prisma deploy module.ts --stage pr-42 creates a branch named pr-42 and deploys the identical app graph into it. A stage name must be a valid git ref name; an invalid name is a hard error.

A preview branch that needs a database gets a fresh, empty one, wired in as a branch-scoped DATABASE_URL. Preview work can never touch production data unless you explicitly point it there. Schema comes from your committed migrations; data does not follow from production.

Preview lifecycle rules:

1. Deleting the upstream git branch tears the whole environment down: services, versions, and databases, including their data.
2. An idle, unpinned preview branch can be reclaimed automatically. Pinning a preview exempts it from idle reclamation, but not from teardown when its git branch is deleted.
3. The production branch is never reclaimed or torn down this way.

Two ways to deploy

GitHub (recommended). Install the Prisma GitHub app and connect the repository: prisma git connect, or import the repository in the Console. From then on, every push builds and deploys on the platform. A push to the default branch deploys production; a push to any other branch creates or updates that branch's preview environment. No workflow file is required, and previews come free with every branch. Opening a pull request does not itself deploy anything; previews track branch pushes.

CLI. prisma deploy module.ts deploys production directly; add --stage <name> for a preview. Authenticate once with prisma auth login (interactive), or set PRISMA_SERVICE_TOKEN (plus PRISMA_WORKSPACE_ID when the token can see more than one workspace) for CI and other headless runs. The first deploy creates the project, named after your module; the name must be unique in the workspace, and --name deploys under a different one.

Both paths converge the same declaration, so they are mutually idempotent: a repo can be connected to GitHub and still be deployed from the CLI.

Services and versions

A service is an HTTP app inside a branch, reachable at a stable URL. Every deploy of a service creates a new immutable version; exactly one version is live behind the stable URL at a time. Versions can be inspected, started, stopped, and deleted individually, and a version's logs can be read or followed; the service group covers all of it.

Two movements between versions matter:

1. Promote takes a version to production by rebuilding it with production-class environment variables. A version built on a preview branch never carries preview configuration into production.
2. Rollback points production back at a previous version. A stopped target is started and health-checked before traffic switches, so rollback is zero-downtime.

Custom domains attach to a service's production branch only. The workflow: add the domain, create the CNAME record the platform reports, and wait for DNS verification and certificate provisioning; a verification that failed on missing DNS is retried after the record exists.

The Compute runtime

Services run on Bun, next to their Prisma Postgres database. There is no container image to author and no platform emulator to install locally.

The runtime has no global Temporal (stock Node 24 lacks one too). Code that reads an ORM DateTime column compiles and deploys, then throws on the first read. Either add the temporal-polyfill dependency and import 'temporal-polyfill/full/global' at the service entry, or use the *String column types such as TimestamptzString.

An idle service sleeps: the platform snapshots its memory after a short period of inactivity and resumes it from the snapshot on the next request. Request handling is unaffected, but background work outside the request lifecycle (setTimeout, setInterval, floating promises) can be interrupted mid-flight. The @prisma/compute package provides the two keep-awake primitives:

1. waitUntil(promise, { signal }) keeps the instance awake until the promise settles.
2. using guard = new KeepAwakeGuard({ signal }) holds the instance awake for a scope; call .release() in a finally block where using is unavailable.

Pass AbortSignal.timeout(ms) as a cost bound: the signal releases the guard, it does not cancel your work. Do not build schedulers on setInterval inside a service; sleeping makes them silently unreliable.

Prisma Postgres

To your application, a Prisma Postgres database is a regular PostgreSQL database behind a connection string: any client works, including Prisma ORM, psql, Kysely, and Drizzle. On top of plain PostgreSQL each database has built-in connection pooling (no PgBouncer to run), optional query caching, and automated backups.

Databases usually come from deploying a module that declares one. They can also be created directly, in which case the connection URL prints exactly once. Additional connection strings can be minted and rotated per database; every secret is shown exactly once at creation, and no later read reveals it. Backups are automated, listable, and restorable, and per-database usage metrics are queryable; the postgres group covers all of it.

Object storage

Buckets are S3-compatible object stores that live inside the project, optionally associated with a branch (the project's default branch when omitted). A bucket cannot be renamed.

Access keys are bucket-scoped credentials with a role of read or read_write. Creating one prints the access key id, secret, endpoint, and provider bucket name exactly once; a lost secret is revoked and re-created, never recovered. The bucket group manages both buckets and their keys.

On Compute, Bun's built-in S3 client picks up S3_ENDPOINT, S3_BUCKET, S3_ACCESS_KEY_ID, and S3_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY from the environment, so a bucket declared in the module needs no client configuration. Locally, a Composer-declared bucket gets a local stand-in with the same S3 surface; code written against it runs unchanged on the platform.

Environment variables

Configuration has two independent axes:

Rules that bite:

1. Branch overrides exist only for the preview class. Production configuration is always the project template; there is no way to give one production deploy a special value.
2. Values are write-only. Listing shows names and scopes, never values, and no API returns them. To change a value you replace it.
3. Variables resolve at deploy time from the branch's class. You never pass environment variables as part of a deploy.
4. Templates, per-branch overrides, and wholesale dotenv import are all managed through the project env group.
5. DATABASE_URL is managed for you when the module declares a database: previews get their own fresh database's URL, production gets the production database's. Only set it yourself for databases the platform does not manage.

Local development

The local stack is real, fast, and needs no cloud credentials. Prefer it over deploying whenever you want to show the user a change or verify your own work:

1. Build the app exactly as you would for deploy, then run prisma dev module.ts. It provisions a local Prisma Postgres database, applies the schema, creates local stand-ins for declared buckets, starts the services, and prints a local URL. It watches built output and restarts a service when its build changes.
2. Exercise the running app directly (for example with curl against the printed URL) instead of reasoning about what the code would do.
3. Stopping dev leaves local databases, buckets, and their data in place; the next run is a warm start. --fresh wipes this app's local instances and data first.
4. Deploying is the same pipeline pointed at the platform: switching from local to hosted is a configuration change, not a code change. Reach for prisma deploy --stage <name> only when you need a shareable URL or platform behaviour (sleeping, real DNS, production-like config).
5. For pure frontend iteration the framework's own dev server also works; the Composer local stack is what mirrors the deployed wiring.

Windows is not supported for the local stack yet.

Failure modes quick reference

1. A secret you need was shown once and is gone. By design: database URLs, connection strings, and bucket keys print exactly once at creation. Rotate or re-create; do not hunt for a read path, none exists.
2. Deploy refuses the module name. Module names are workspace-unique. Deploy under --name <other>, or delete the conflicting project.
3. A preview environment vanished. Its git branch was deleted, or it sat idle unpinned and was reclaimed. Push or deploy the branch again to re-create it; the database starts empty again.
4. Background work never ran in production. The service slept. Wrap the work in waitUntil or a KeepAwakeGuard, or move it out of the service.
5. A custom domain stays unverified. The CNAME to the reported target must exist first. Fix DNS, then retry the verification.
6. Production shows a stale value after an environment-variable change. Variables are resolved at deploy time. Re-deploy (or promote) so the new value is picked up.
7. A stage name is rejected. Stage names must be valid git ref names; rename it.
8. A resource disappeared from the platform after a deploy. It was removed from module.ts; the module is the source of truth and deploy converges to it. Restore the declaration and re-deploy.
9. dev or deploy rejects the app graph (COMPOSE.GRAPH_INVALID) over a name. Resource ids declared in the module (provision() ids, compute({ name })) allow [A-Za-z0-9] only. A hyphenated id passes authoring and typecheck, then fails here. Module and project names do accept hyphens, so never derive a resource id from them.
10. A deployed service errors on its first timestamp read (RUNTIME.TEMPORAL_UNAVAILABLE). The runtime has no global Temporal; see the Compute runtime section for the polyfill.

What the platform doesn't do yet

Name the gap instead of inventing an API:

1. No branch create or delete from the CLI. The branch group only lists. Branches are created by pushing or by deploying a stage, and removed by deleting the upstream git branch; there is no CLI teardown verb for a stage yet.
2. No build retry. A failed build is finished; the retry is the next push or the next deploy.
3. No reading environment-variable values back, anywhere. This is a security stance, not a missing feature, but agents look for it often enough to name here.
4. No bucket rename and no bucket-to-branch re-association after creation; re-create instead.

For anything else missing, run the nearest group with --help before concluding it does not exist, and route requests with prisma feedback rather than guessing.

Related skills

Everything inside the app is owned by the siblings: the data contract, queries, and migrations by prisma-orm-core-concepts (and prisma-orm-migrations), and the declaration of services, modules, wiring, and testing seams by prisma-composer-core-concepts. The skills install together via prisma skills sync; when a task crosses from platform resources into app code, switch skills instead of guessing.