Postgres

FluxNow provisions a managed Postgres database for your app. Postgres is on by default — you get one unless you explicitly opt out.

What you get

Postgres 18 with pgvector for vector embeddings and PostGIS for geospatial queries
Automatic provisioning — no setup required
Daily backups with 7-day retention

Environment variables

FluxNow injects the connection details into your container at deploy time under a broad set of aliases, so any driver or framework works unchanged. You never set these yourself — read them straight from the environment:

Variable	For
`DATABASE_URL`	The full connection string — most clients (Prisma, Drizzle, SQLAlchemy, `pg`, …)
`PGHOST` · `PGPORT` · `PGUSER` · `PGPASSWORD` · `PGDATABASE`	libpq discrete form — `psql`, `pgx`, `node-postgres`, `pg` gem
`PGSSLMODE`	`disable` (in-cluster traffic is plaintext, a single hop)
`POSTGRES_HOST` · `POSTGRES_PORT` · `POSTGRES_USER` · `POSTGRES_PASSWORD` · `POSTGRES_DB`	NestJS / TypeORM / `@nestjs/config` convention
`POSTGRES_URL`	Vercel Postgres-style url clients
`DIRECT_URL`	Prisma direct (non-pooled) connection for migrations
`JDBC_URL` · `JDBC_DATABASE_URL`	JVM / Spring / JDBC clients

Most apps just read DATABASE_URL:

import { Pool } from "pg";
const pool = new Pool({ connectionString: process.env.DATABASE_URL });

You do not create the database, generate a password, or paste a connection string anywhere — provisioning does all of that and wires it into your app. See the Environment Variables reference for every service’s variables in one place.

Preview environments

Each pull request preview environment gets its own isolated Postgres database. The schema is branched from staging at preview creation time, so your migrations and seed data are available in previews from the start.

Migrations

Run migrations with the release command — a pre-deploy step that runs against the target environment’s database before the new version takes traffic. Set it with spec.release in fluxnow.yaml (or let FluxNow auto-detect it from a Procfile or your framework):

spec:
  runtime: node
  release: bun run db:migrate

See Release command (migrations) for how it runs, auto-detection, and failure behavior.

Enabling / disabling Postgres

Postgres is on by default. To turn it off, set db.enabled: false in fluxnow.yaml — at the top level for a single service, or under an app’s spec in a monorepo:

db:
  enabled: false