How to add TLS/SSL cert for PlanetScale DB to App Platform

Posted on March 4, 2023

Hello I have DB that I want to connect to my Nodejs app running in the DO App Platform. I followed the concept in this post to add the env vars and CA path for allow my app to connect: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/how-can-we-configure-planetscale-with-app-platform

However I think the CA path and env var may be different for Nodejs app vs Laravel like in that post. Has anyone had any luck connecting to PlanetScale DB’s via mysql2 in a Nodejs app before?

Any help is greatly appreciated 🙏

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Bobby

April 8, 2023

Accepted Answer

Hi there,

What I would personally do is to follow the steps from the official Planescale guide here:

https://planetscale.com/docs/tutorials/connect-nodejs-app

You can add a DATABASE_URL environment variable with the following content:

mysql://<USERNAME>:<PLAIN_TEXT_PASSWORD>@<ACCESS_HOST_URL>/<DATABASE_NAME>?ssl={"rejectUnauthorized":true}

And then reference it in your create connection statement as follows:

require('dotenv').config();
const express = require('express')
const app = express()
const port = process.env.PORT || 3000

const mysql = require('mysql2')
const connection = mysql.createConnection(process.env.DATABASE_URL);

connection.connect()

app.get('/', (req, res) => {
  connection.query('SELECT * FROM users', function (err, rows, fields) {
    if (err) throw err

    res.send(rows)
  })
})

app.listen(port, () => {
  console.log(`Example app listening at http://localhost:${port}`)
})

They also have an example repo here:

https://github.com/planetscale/express-example/tree/main

Let me know how it goes!

An alternative option here would be to add your database details as separate environment variables as described in the discussion that you’ve linked to and then reference the CA file as follows:

const fs = require('fs');
const mysql = require('mysql2');

const connection = mysql.createConnection({
  host: process.env.DB_HOST,
  user: process.env.DB_USER,
  password: process.env.DB_PASSWORD,
  database: process.env.DB_NAME,
  port: process.env.DB_PORT,
  ssl: {
    ca: fs.readFileSync(process.env.MYSQL_SSL_CA)
  }
});