Getting started

Installation

Sequelize is available via NPM.

$ npm install --save sequelize

# And one of the following:
$ npm install --save pg pg-hstore
$ npm install --save mysql2
$ npm install --save sqlite3
$ npm install --save tedious // MSSQL

Setting up a connection

Sequelize will setup a connection pool on initialization so you should ideally only ever create one instance per database if you're connecting to the DB from a single process. If you're connecting to the DB from multiple processes, you'll have to create one instance per process, but each instance should have a maximum connection pool size of "max connection pool size divided by number of instances". So, if you wanted a max connection pool size of 90 and you had 3 worker processes, each process's instance should have a max connection pool size of 30.

var sequelize = new Sequelize('database', 'username', 'password', {
  host: 'localhost',
  dialect: 'mysql'|'sqlite'|'postgres'|'mssql',

  pool: {
    max: 5,
    min: 0,
    idle: 10000
  },

  // SQLite only
  storage: 'path/to/database.sqlite'
});

// Or you can simply use a connection uri
var sequelize = new Sequelize('postgres://user:[email protected]:5432/dbname');

The Sequelize constructor takes a whole slew of options that are available via the API reference.

Test the connection

You can use the .authenticate() function like this to test the connection.

sequelize
  .authenticate()
  .then(function(err) {
    console.log('Connection has been established successfully.');
  })
  .catch(function (err) {
    console.log('Unable to connect to the database:', err);
  });

Your first model

Models are defined with sequelize.define('name', {attributes}, {options}).

var User = sequelize.define('user', {
  firstName: {
    type: Sequelize.STRING
  },
  lastName: {
    type: Sequelize.STRING
  }
});

// force: true will drop the table if it already exists
User.sync({force: true}).then(function () {
  // Table created
  return User.create({
    firstName: 'John',
    lastName: 'Hancock'
  });
});

You can read more about creating models at Model API reference

Your first query

User.findAll().then(function(users) {
  console.log(users)
})

You can read more about finder functions on models like .findAll() at Data retrieval or how to do specific queries like WHERE and JSONB at Querying.

Application wide model options

The Sequelize constructor takes a define option which will be used as the default options for all defined models.

var sequelize = new Sequelize('connectionUri', {
  define: {
    timestamps: false // true by default
  }
});

var User = sequelize.define('user', {}); // timestamps is false by default
var Post = sequelize.define('post', {}, {
  timestamps: true // timestamps will now be true
});

Promises

Sequelize uses promises to control async control-flow. If you are unfamiliar with how promises work, don't worry, you can read up on them here and here.

Basically, a promise represents a value which will be present at some point - "I promise you I will give you a result or an error at some point". This means that

// DON'T DO THIS
user = User.findOne()

console.log(user.get('firstName'));

will never work! This is because user is a promise object, not a data row from the DB. The right way to do it is:

User.findOne().then(function (user) {
    console.log(user.get('firstName'));
});

Once you've got the hang of what promises are and how they work, use the bluebird API reference as your go-to tool. In particular, you'll probably be using .all a lot.

Getting Start