Prisma CLI

Beta of the unified Prisma CLI.

This repository contains the unified Prisma command-line experience: one binary for the ORM, Composer, and the Prisma Developer Platform — projects, branches, services, service versions, environment variables, and the Prisma ORM schema and migration workflow.

The 8.0.0 release candidates publish as prisma (binary prisma) and @prisma/cli (binary prisma-cli) on the next dist-tag.

Install

pnpm add -D @prisma/cli@next
pnpm prisma-cli --help

Example workflow:

pnpm prisma-cli auth login
pnpm prisma-cli project create my-app
pnpm prisma-cli git connect git@github.com:owner/repo.git
pnpm prisma-cli project env add --file .env --role preview
pnpm prisma-cli project env list --role preview

Deployments start from pushing the connected repository, the Console, or prisma-cli deploy.

Local Development

Requirements:

• Node.js 24 or newer
• pnpm 10+

Install dependencies:

pnpm install

Run the source CLI:

pnpm prisma --help

Run tests:

pnpm test

Build the package:

pnpm build:cli

Inspect the npm package locally without publishing:

pnpm --filter @prisma/cli pack --dry-run

Command Model

The CLI groups commands by developer workflow:

• auth
• project
• git
• branch
• database
• bucket
• app

The canonical command shape is:

prisma <group> <action>

The package includes project, environment-variable, service and service-version inspection, promotion, rollback, and deletion commands, plus the Prisma ORM (contract, db, migration, orm init) and Composer workflows (root dev and deploy), and the postgres and bucket resource groups. The product model intentionally avoids product-specific namespaces.

Documentation

The public docs start at docs/README.md.

Product behavior is defined in docs/product.

Start here when changing command behavior:

1. docs/product/command-principles.md
2. docs/product/cli-style-guide.md
3. docs/product/output-conventions.md
4. docs/product/error-conventions.md

See CONTRIBUTING.md for local development and contribution guidance. See ARCHITECTURE.md for the short architecture entrypoint.

The npm package README lives at packages/cli/README.md.

Community

Issues and feedback are welcome while the CLI is in public beta. Pull requests should be tied to an existing issue or maintainer agreement so product behavior, docs, and tests stay aligned.

Please follow CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md in project spaces. Security reports should use SECURITY.md, not public issues.

Examples

Manual smoke apps live in:

• examples/hello-world
• examples/next-smoke

They are intentionally not part of the root pnpm workspace. Install dependencies inside an example only when you want to run manual end-to-end checks.

Publishing

Publishing happens through the Publish to npm GitHub Actions workflow. Do not publish from a local checkout unless the release owner explicitly asks you to do so. The full policy and procedure live in docs/oss/versioning.md.

The committed root package.json version (mirrored across the workspace in lockstep) is the release source of truth. The workflow publishes @prisma/cli-engine and then @prisma/cli.

Release channels:

• latest: releases on the Prisma 8 RC line (8.0.0-rc.N). A merged chore(release) PR that bumps the root version (via pnpm bump-version) publishes automatically; workflow_dispatch is the manual escape hatch and the dry-run path.
• dev: latest successful main build. Every push to main that does not change the root version publishes <base>-dev.N under the dev dist-tag. Commit traceability comes from npm provenance and the GitHub Actions run.
• PR preview packages: trusted same-repo pull requests get an installable pkg.pr.new comment for the exact commit. Fork PRs do not publish preview packages automatically. Preview publishing is best-effort and requires the pkg.pr.new GitHub App to be installed for this repository. Once that app is installed, set the repository variable CLI_PR_PREVIEW_REQUIRED=true to make preview publishing failures block CI.

For a release: run pnpm bump-version on a branch, commit, open the release PR, and merge it — the merge is the publish trigger (docs/oss/versioning.md has the full procedure).

If a release workflow fails after the npm publish step, check npm before rerunning. The package version may already be published even if the GitHub Release creation failed.