Data

Celest offers built-in database support thanks to the powerful combination of the Drift (opens in a new tab) library and the Turso (opens in a new tab) platform.

Drift is a Dart-native ORM that allows you to define your database schema in Dart code and generate the necessary SQL code to create and manage your database. Drift works best when it's backed by SQLite, and we think SQLite is a great choice of database for both frontend and backend environments alike.

The only problem is that SQLite cannot scale beyond a single server which is why it's often scoffed at by enterprise developers. That's where Turso comes in. Turso is the company behind libSQL (opens in a new tab), an open-source fork of SQLite which builds on top of the SQLite codebase to provide a distributed, scalable, and secure database solution.

Celest is proud to be the first Dart platform to offer Turso support out of the box, allowing you to build scalable and secure applications no matter the size of your user base.

Getting Started

To add a database to your Celest project, you need to define your database schema in Dart code. This is done using the Drift library.

Here is an example database schema for a simple task management app:

import 'package:drift/drift.dart';
 
part 'task_database.g.dart';
 
class Tasks extends Table {
  late final id = integer().autoIncrement()();
  late final title = text().withLength(min: 1, max: 100)();
  late final completed = boolean().withDefault(const Constant(false))();
}
 
@DriftDatabase(tables: [Tasks])
class TaskDatabase extends _$TaskDatabase {
  TaskDatabase(super.e);
 
  @override
  int get schemaVersion => 1;
}

For more guidance on writing Drift schemas, see the excellent documentation provided by the Drift author on their website: Drift Documentation (opens in a new tab).

Once you have a Drift schema, you're ready to add it to your Celest project. Navigate to your project.dart file and add the following code:

import 'package:celest/celest.dart';
import 'package:celest_backend/src/database/task_database.dart';
 
const project = Project(name: 'tasks');
 
const taskDatabase = Database(
  schema: Schema.drift(TaskDatabase),
);

That's it! When you run celest start, Celest will automatically handle the database setup for you. You can now interact with your database using the generated celest global from your cloud functions.

import 'package:celest/celest.dart';
import 'package:celest_backend/src/database/task_database.dart';
import 'package:celest_backend/src/generated/cloud.celest.dart';
 
TaskDatabase get db => celest.data.taskDatabase;
 
@cloud
Future<List<Task>> listAllTasks() async {
  print('Fetching tasks...');
  return db.select(db.tasks).get();
}