Set Up a MySQL Data Capsule

Create a MySQL Data Capsule

Log in to your Code Capsules account and navigate to the Space your MySQL Data Capsule will be contained in. Click the yellow + button and select the “MySQL Data Capsule” option from the Create New Capsule dialog.

Choose your payment option, then click the “Create Capsule” button.

Binding a Data Capsule to a Backend Capsule

To use the Data Capsule with your Backend Capsule, you’ll need to link the two. Navigate to the Backend Capsule and click “Config” to open the Capsule’s configuration tab. Scroll down to the “Bind Data capsule” section, and you’ll see your recently created data capsule.

Click “Bind” to bind your Data and Backend Capsules. During the bind process, Code Capsules creates a DATABASE_URL environmental variable to let your Backend Capsule know how to access your Data Capsule’s services and features. Once the two capsules have been bound, you can scroll to the top of the “Configure” tab to find the value of this variable under the “Capsule parameters” section.

We can use this database variable in code to read and write to our Data Capsule. Copy the value of the DATABASE_URL variable and append /your_db_name to it as a query parameter. Make sure to replace your_db_name with the actual name of your database. This tells the Data Capsule to read and write to the specified database. If a database named your_db_name doesn’t exist, the Data Capsule will create it. This allows you to have multiple databases in one Data Capsule. Take note if you copy the DATABASE_URL value from the capsule, it will already include the name of the default database you used whilst creating the data capsule as part of the string.

Connecting to a MySQL Data Capsule from a Python Application

If your Backend Capsule is a Python application, use the following code to connect to your MySQL Data Capsule:

import os
import mysql.connector

data_capsule_url = os.getenv('DATABASE_URL')
employees_database_url = data_capsule_url + "/employees"

cnx = mysql.connector.connect(user='yourusername', password='yourpassword',
                              host=employees_database_url,
                              database='employees')

### Do something with the cnx variable here

cnx.close()

Connecting to a MySQL Data Capsule from a Node.js Application

If your Backend Capsule is a Node.js application, use the following code to connect to your MySQL Data Capsule:

var mysql = require('mysql');
var data_capsule_url = process.env.DATABASE_URL
var employees_database_url = data_capsule_url + "/employees"

var con = mysql.createConnection({
  host: employees_database_url,
  user: "yourusername",
  password: "yourpassword"
});

con.connect(function(err) {
  if (err) throw err;
  console.log("Connected!");
  // Do something with the db here
});