Using Go and pgx

Note

Experimental support for pgx/v5 was added in v1.17.2. Full support will be included in v1.18.0. Until then, you’ll need to pass the --experimental flag to sqlc generate.

pgx is a pure Go driver and toolkit for PostgreSQL. It’s become the default PostgreSQL package for many Gophers since lib/pq was put into maitience mode.

Getting started

To start generating code that uses pgx, set the sql_package field in your sqlc.yaml configuration file. Valid options are pgx/v4 or pgx/v5

version: "2"
sql:
  - engine: "postgresql"
    queries: "query.sql"
    schema: "query.sql"
    gen:
      go:
        package: "db"
        sql_package: "pgx/v5"
        out: "db"

If you don’t have an existing sqlc project on hand, create a directory with the configuration file above and the following query.sql file.

CREATE TABLE authors (
  id   BIGSERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
  name text      NOT NULL,
  bio  text
);

-- name: GetAuthor :one
SELECT * FROM authors
WHERE id = $1 LIMIT 1;

-- name: ListAuthors :many
SELECT * FROM authors
ORDER BY name;

-- name: CreateAuthor :one
INSERT INTO authors (
  name, bio
) VALUES (
  $1, $2
)
RETURNING *;

-- name: DeleteAuthor :exec
DELETE FROM authors
WHERE id = $1;

Generating the code will now give you pgx-compatible database access methods.

sqlc generate --experimental

Generated code walkthrough

The generated code is very similar to the code generated when using lib/pq. However, instead of using database/sql, the code uses pgx types directly.

package main

import (
    "context"
    "fmt"
    "os"

    "github.com/jackc/pgx/v5"

    "example.com/sqlc-tutorial/db"
)

func main() {
    // urlExample := "postgres://username:password@localhost:5432/database_name"
    conn, err := pgx.Connect(context.Background(), os.Getenv("DATABASE_URL"))
    if err != nil {
            fmt.Fprintf(os.Stderr, "Unable to connect to database: %v\n", err)
            os.Exit(1)
    }
    defer conn.Close(context.Background())

    q := db.New(conn)

    author, err := q.GetAuthor(context.Background(), 1)
    if err != nil {
            fmt.Fprintf(os.Stderr, "GetAuthor failed: %v\n", err)
            os.Exit(1)
    }

    fmt.Println(author.Name)
}