Add a free Heroku Postgresql database to your serverless web app

Heroku offers ☁️ remotely hosted Postgresql databases on all tiers. This note focuses on using the DB only without hosting the app on Heroku.

Create a Heroku account and create an app from the Heroku dashboard.
Open your app, go to "Resources", search for "Heroku Postgres" in the "Add-ons" section, add it.
Once added, click the "Heroku Postgres" item, which will take you to your Datastores Dashboard.
Go to the "Settings" page. Click "View Credentials", copy the URI value, and you can start connecting to the DB.

The DB URL should look like this:

postgres://{RANDOM_USER_ID_AND_PASSWORD}@{AWS_CONTAINER_SUBDOMAIN}.amazonaws.com:5432/{RANDOM_DB_NAME}

caution
Your DB URL is private. Make sure not to accidentally commit it to git/version control by storing it in an env config file and adding the file to .gitignore.

Since I use Prisma as an ORM for my Next.js web app^[Prisma is framework-agnostic; you can use it with Next, Remix, Astro, etc.],I use the DB URL in my schema like this.

# .env
PRISMA_DB_URL=postgres://...

// prisma.schema
datasource db {
  provider = "postgresql"
  url      = env("PRISMA_DB_URL")
}

// ... other stuff

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