Integrate with existing databases

Encore automatically provision the necessary infrastructure when you create a service and add a database. However, you may want to connect to an existing database for migration or prototyping purposes. It's simple to integrate your Encore app with an existing database in these cases.

Example

Let's say you have an external database hosted by DigitalOcean that you would like to connect to. The simplest approach is to create a dedicated package that lazily instantiates a database connection pool. We can store the password using Encore's secrets manager to make it even easier.

The connection string is something that looks like:

postgresql://user:password@externaldb-do-user-1234567-0.db.ondigitalocean.com:25010/externaldb?sslmode=require

So we write something like:

pkg/externaldb/externaldb.go

package externaldb

import (
    "context"
    "fmt"

    "github.com/jackc/pgx/v4/pgxpool"
    "go4.org/syncutil"
)

// Get returns a database connection pool to the external database.
// It is lazily created on first use.
func Get(ctx context.Context) (*pgxpool.Pool, error) {
    // Attempt to setup the database connection pool if it hasn't
    // already been successfully setup.
    err := once.Do(func() error {
        var err error
        pool, err = setup(ctx)
        return err
    })
    return pool, err
}

var (
    // once is like sync.Once except it re-arms itself on failure
    once syncutil.Once
    // pool is the successfully created database connection pool,
    // or nil when no such pool has been setup yet.
    pool *pgxpool.Pool
)

var secrets struct {
    // ExternalDBPassword is the database password for authenticating
    // with the external database hosted on DigitalOcean.
    ExternalDBPassword string
}

// setup attempts to set up a database connection pool.
func setup(ctx context.Context) (*pgxpool.Pool, error) {
    connString := fmt.Sprintf("postgresql://%s:%[email protected]:25010/externaldb?sslmode=require",
        "user", secrets.ExternalDBPassword)
    return pgxpool.Connect(ctx, connString)
}

Before running, remember to use encore secrets set to store the ExternalDBPassword to use. (But don't worry, Encore will remind you if you forget.)

Other infrastructure

The same pattern can easily be adapted to other infrastructure components that Encore doesn't yet provide built-in support for:

• Horizontally scalable databases like Cassandra, DynamoDB, BigTable, and so on
• Document or graph databases like MongoDB or Neo4j
• Other cloud primitives like queues, object storage buckets, and more
• Or really any cloud services or APIs you can think of

In this way you can easily integrate Encore with anything you want.