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Command line & SDKs/CLI Reference

Neon CLI commands — connection-string

Use the Neon CLI to manage Neon directly from the terminal

Before you begin

  • Before running the connection-string command, ensure that you have installed the Neon CLI.
  • If you have not authenticated with the neon auth command, running a Neon CLI command automatically launches the Neon CLI browser authentication process. Alternatively, you can specify a Neon API key using the --api-key option when running a command. See Connect.

For information about connecting to Neon, see Connect from any application.

The connection-string command

This command gets a Postgres connection string for connecting to a database in your Neon project. You can construct a connection string for any database in any branch. The connection string includes the password for the specified role.

Usage

neon connection-string [branch[@timestamp|@LSN]] [options]

branch specifies the branch name or ID. If a branch name or ID is omitted, the default branch is used. @timestamp|@LSN is used to specify a specific point in the branch's history for time travel connections. If omitted, the current state (HEAD) is used.

Options

In addition to the Neon CLI global options, the connection-string command supports these options:

OptionDescriptionTypeRequired
--context-fileContext file path and file namestring
--project-idProject IDstringOnly if your Neon account has more than one project
--role-nameRole namestringOnly if your branch has more than one role
--database-nameDatabase namestringOnly if your branch has more than one database
--pooledConstruct a pooled connection. The default is false.boolean
--prismaConstruct a connection string for use with Prisma. The default is false.boolean
--endpoint-typeThe compute type. The default is read-write. The choices are read_only and read_writestring
--extendedShow extended information. The default is false.boolean
--psqlConnect to a database via psql using connection string. psql must be installed to use this option.boolean

Examples

  • Get a basic connection string for the current project, branch, and database:

    neon connection-string mybranch
    postgres://alex:AbC123dEf@ep-cool-darkness-123456.us-east-2.aws.neon.tech/dbname
  • Get a pooled connection string for the current project, branch, and database with the --pooled option. This option adds a -pooler flag to the host name which enables connection pooling for clients that use this connection string.

    neon connection-string --pooled
    postgres://alex:AbC123dEf@ep-cool-darkness-123456-pooler.us-east-2.aws.neon.tech/dbname
  • Get a connection string for use with Prisma for the current project, branch, and database. The --prisma options adds connect_timeout=30 option to the connection string to ensure that connections from Prisma Client do not timeout.

    neon connection-string --prisma
    postgres://alex:AbC123dEf@ep-cool-darkness-123456.us-east-2.aws.neon.tech/dbname?connect_timeout=30
  • Get a connection string to a specific point in a branch's history by appending @timestamp or @lsn. Availability depends on your configured history retention window.

    neon connection-string @2024-04-21T00:00:00Z

    For additional examples, see How to use Time Travel.

  • Get a connection string and connect with psql.

    neon connection-string --psql
  • Get a connection string, connect with psql, and run an .sql file.

    neon connection-string --psql -- -f dump.sql
  • Get a connection string, connect with psql, and run a query.

    neon connection-string --psql -- -c "SELECT version()"

Need help?

Join our Discord Server to ask questions or see what others are doing with Neon. Users on paid plans can open a support ticket from the console. For more detail, see Getting Support.

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