Crunchy Bridge and Koyeb

Crunchy Bridge is a fully managed Postgres service from Crunchy Data. It runs and manages your Postgres database and offers backups, disaster recovery with point-in-time recovery, and built-in connection pooling.

This guide explains how to connect a Crunchy Bridge PostgreSQL database to an application running on Koyeb. To successfully follow this documentation, you will need to have:

A Koyeb account to deploy the application. You can optionally install the Koyeb CLI to deploy the application from the command line
A Crunchy Bridge account to deploy the PostgreSQL database

The application that connects to the Crunchy Bridge PostgreSQL database uses Prisma as an ORM. Prisma is an open-source ORM. We use it to synchronize our database schema with our Prisma schema.

If you already have a freshly created Crunchy Bridge Postgres database running and want to quickly preview how to connect your database to an application running on Koyeb, use the Deploy to Koyeb button below.

Make sure to replace the DATABASE_URL environment variable with the connection string of your Crunchy Bridge Postgres database.

Create a Crunchy Bridge PostgreSQL database

To create a Crunchy Bridge PostgreSQL database, sign into your Crunchy Bridge account.

On the Crunchy Bridge control panel, start by clicking the Create Cluster button to provision a cluster and access the database creation page.

Give a name to your cluster, e.g., postgres-koyeb
Select the Cloud Service provider for your Postgres database between AWS, Azure, or GCP. For this guide, we use AWS
Pick the Region to run the database in. Here, we use EU Central (Frankfurt) as our compute will be deployed in this region on Koyeb
Select a database Tier. Depending on the tier you select you will be able to access different instances type. For this guide, we use the Hobby tier
Choose the Instance size according to your needs. Here we use the Hobby-0 with 0.5 GB memory and 2vCores
Pick the PostgreSQL Version to use for the database. Here we use Postgres 15
Choose the amount of Storage needed for your database, e.g., 10 GB.
Depending on your project's criticality, there is an option to enable High Availability. In our case, we don't need it and keep the default value to No

When you are done configuring your database, click the Create Cluster button. Your cluster will be provisioned.

Retrieve your Crunchy Bridge Postgres connection string

On the Crunchy Bridge control panel, click on the Connection tab to retrieve the connection string to connect the database.

By default, three Roles are created to connect your database with different privileges. You can learn more about these roles and permissions in the Crunchy Bridge’s User Management documentation.

For this guide, we will use the application role to connect the database which has standard permissions. Select the URL format and copy it.

The connection string should be similar to the following:

postgres://application:<password>@<host>:<port>/postgres

Save it in a safe place, we will need it in the next step to connect our application to the database.

Deploy the application on Koyeb

You can deploy on Koyeb using the control panel or via the Koyeb CLI.

Via the Koyeb control panel

To deploy the example application using the control panel, follow these steps:

Create a new Koyeb App
Setgithub.com/koyeb/example-express-prisma as the GitHub repository to deploy and keep the default branch main
Set npm run postgres:init as the Build command
Add a DATABASE_URL environment variable to indicate the application how to connect to the Postgres database. Give the environment variable a name, DATABASE_URL and enter the connection string from earlier as the value
Name your service, for instance, express-crunchy-bridge
Click the Create service button

Koyeb is now building the application. Once the build has finished, you will be able to access your application running on Koyeb by clicking the URL ending with .koyeb.app.

The example application exposes a /planets endpoint that you can use to list planets from the database. Once your deployment is live, you should see the following results when navigating to https://<YOUR_APP_URL>.koyeb.app/planets:

[
  {
    "id": 1,
    "name": "Mercury"
  },
  {
    "id": 2,
    "name": "Venus"
  },
  {
    "id": 3,
    "name": "Mars"
  }
]

Via the Koyeb CLI

To deploy the example application using the Koyeb CLI, run the following command in your terminal:

koyeb app init express-crunchy-bridge \
--git github.com/koyeb/example-express-prisma \
--git-branch main \
--git-build-command "npm run postgres:init" \
--ports 8080:http \
--routes /:8080 \
--env PORT=8080 \
--env DATABASE_URL="postgres://application:<password>@<host>:<port>/postgres"

Make sure to replace password, host, and port with your own.

Access deployment logs

To track the app deployment and visualize build logs, execute the following command:

koyeb service logs express-crunchy-bridge/express-crunchy-bridge -t build

Access your app

Once the deployment of your application has finished, you can retrieve the public domain to access your application by running the following command:

$ koyeb app get express-crunchy-bridge
ID      	NAME                          DOMAINS                          	              CREATED AT
ec6a4311	express-crunchy-bridge        ["express-crunchy-bridge-ed.koyeb.app"]	      4 Nov 22 16:16 UTC

[
  {
    "id": 1,
    "name": "Mercury"
  },
  {
    "id": 2,
    "name": "Venus"
  },
  {
    "id": 3,
    "name": "Mars"
  }
]

Delete the example application and Crunchy Bridge PostgreSQL database

To delete the example application and the Crunchy Bridge PostgreSQL database and avoid incurring any charges, follow these steps:

From the Crunchy Bridge dashboard, go to the Settings tab and click Destroy Cluster. Follow the instructions.
From the Koyeb control panel, select the App to delete. Under the Settings tab, click the Delete button and follow the instructions.