Config File

We know that writing parameters and flags every time you want to connect to a database can be very tedious, so dblab provides the option to create a YAML file with the configuration to connect to the database. You can define multiple database configurations under the database field; just be sure to use different names for each of them.

For this example, we'll be using a PostgreSQL database, so the driver to use would be postgres. Remember that every driver has different args that we can include in the config YAML.

Single database

In order to connect to a local database hosted at 0.0.0.0:5432, we can just copy and paste the following configuration to a file named .dblab.yaml stored either in the root of your current directory, in your $HOME path ($HOME/.dblab.yaml), or in your $XDG_CONFIG_HOME path ($XDG_CONFIG_HOME/.dblab.yaml).

database:
  - name: "local"
    host: "0.0.0.0"
    port: 5432
    db: "postgres"
    password: "postgres"
    user: "postgres"
    driver: "postgres"
    # optional
    # postgres only, schema default value: public
    # schema: "public"
limit: 50

Once created, we can launch dblab with the command:

dblab --config

If you don't specify the name of the database configuration with --cfg-name, then dblab will use the first configuration defined under the database field.

Multiple Databases

But, as we all know, on a daily basis we tend to access multiple databases or the "same" database in different environments. So using the --cfg-name flag can be very handy in these cases.

In the following case we have 3 environments: local, staging, and prod. The YAML file would look like this (but with your own credentials):

database:
  - name: "local"
    host: "<LOCAL HOST ADDRESS>"
    port: 5432
    db: "<DB NAME>"
    password: "<PASSWORD>"
    user: "<USERNAME>"
    schema: "public"
    driver: "postgres"
  - name: "staging"
    host: "<STAGING HOST ADDRESS>"
    port: 5432
    db: "<DB NAME>"
    password: "<PASSWORD>"
    user: "<USERNAME>"
    schema: "public"
    driver: "postgres"
  - name: "prod"
    host: "<PROD HOST ADDRESS>"
    port: 5432
    db: "<DB NAME>"
    password: "<PASSWORD>"
    user: "<USERNAM>"
    schema: "public"
    driver: "postgres"
# should be greater than 0, otherwise the app will error out
limit: 50

And in order to launch a specific environment/configuration we have to use the --cfg-name flag, followed by the name of the database configuration.

dblab --config --cfg-name "prod"