Why are the db config and generators mixed with the schema definition?

I’m curious if there’s a reason behind this:

generator photon {
  provider = "photonjs"
}

generator nexus_prisma {
  provider = "nexus-prisma"
}

datasource db {
  provider = "sqlite"
  url      = "file:dev.db"
}

being inside the schema.prisma file. I think it makes more sense if it’s in a separate file.

[tianhuil]

@matthewmueller: I think separating out and being able to import .prisma files solves this problem but I thought I would document the use case below:

I would like to be able to separate out datasource from the schema. We often want to have the same app running on several databases (production, staging, testing, QA, dev) and being able to swap databases, while keeping the same schema would be valuable. Currently, I can do this by making each field an env variable and having separate .env fields but that’s pretty tedious. Hope you implement importing of .prisma files soon!

See also https://github.com/prisma/prisma2/issues/375 and https://github.com/prisma/prisma2/issues/150.

[matthewmueller]

@kitze Hey! I was the one that pushed for Prisma having a single syntax that supports both configuration and schema definitions in a single file. Prisma’s syntax is inspired by HCL (Terraform’s language). We like how HCL is able to nicely model relationships in text.

Additionally, we came to the conclusion that both the database configuration and the schema definition are just application configuration. The schema definition is actually just “configuration for your database”.

That being said, we anticipate that many people will prefer to separate this configuration from the schema. In the past, we used YAML for configuration and GraphQL’s SDL syntax for the schema definition. This made the separation mandatory. We wanted to make this separation optional.

It’s not implemented yet, but soon you’ll be able to import .prisma files. Here’s a spec for how that will look: https://github.com/prisma/specs/tree/master/schema#importing-schemas