Integrate prisma in a secure and scalable manner.

Based on https://github.com/electron-react-boilerplate/electron-react-boilerplate. All initial work was done by Ayron Wohletz: https://dev.to/awohletz/an-electron-app-architecture-32hi

I highly recommend his articles.

Install project dependencies with npm install. Run npm run prisma:init for initial migration and prisma client generation. Then run npm install again to run the postinstall script (or you can run the postinstall script directly).

You need to understand the double package.json structure used by above boilerplate. Native modules go to release/app/package.json. So prisma and @prisma/client is added there. The prisma cli will also install this in the root package.json.

The output of the prisma client generated from prisma/schema.prisma needs to go to ../release/app/node_modules/@prisma/client in order to get handled by the native binaries. Inside prisma/schema.prisma you can select the target binaries, depending on your compilation target: binaryTargets = ["native", "windows"]

Electron builder config takes care that these files are included in the build, outside the ASAR:

"files": [
      "dist",
      "node_modules",
      "package.json",
      "prisma/**/*",
      "resources/**/*",
      "!**/node_modules/@prisma/engines/introspection-engine*",
      "!**/node_modules/@prisma/engines/migration-engine*",
      "!**/node_modules/@prisma/engines/prisma-fmt*",
      "!**/node_modules/@prisma/engines/query_engine-*",
      "!**/node_modules/@prisma/engines/libquery_engine*",
      "!**/node_modules/prisma/query_engine*",
      "!**/node_modules/prisma/libquery_engine*",
      "!**/node_modules/prisma/**/*.mjs"
    ],
    "extraResources": [
      "./assets/**",
      "prisma/**/*",
      "node_modules/@prisma/engines/migration-engine*",
      "node_modules/@prisma/engines/query*",
      "node_modules/@prisma/engines/libquery*"
    ],

Prisma is exposed via ContextBridge to the renderer. In the main process we need to bootstrap the DB and set some IPC handlers to get our binary paths.

// src/main/preload.js
const { PrismaClient } = require('@prisma/client');

const dbPath = ipcRenderer.sendSync('config:get-prisma-db-path');
const qePath = ipcRenderer.sendSync('config:get-prisma-qe-path');

const prisma = new PrismaClient({
  datasources: {
    db: {
      url: `file:${dbPath}`,
    },
  },
  // see https://github.com/prisma/prisma/discussions/5200
  __internal: {
    engine: {
      // @ts-expect-error internal prop
      binaryPath: qePath,
    },
  },
});

A postinstall script in chore/post-install.js is run to fix the prisma cold start time problem. Read more about it here: prisma/prisma#8484

If no db exists in the packaged app, the db from prisma/dev.db will be copied to the app's user data folder.

Migrations/updates

• https://dev.to/awohletz/an-electron-app-architecture-32hi
• https://github.com/TasinIshmam/prisma-electron-test
• prisma/prisma#5200
• prisma/prisma#9613