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Neki uses the Postgres wire protocol, so you can connect with psql or any standard Postgres driver. Your applications connect to a Neki router instead of connecting to each shard’s primary or replicas. The router plans each statement and sends it to the required Postgres shards. Create a role for each application or permission boundary. The same role can be reused by that application’s connection pool and other connections that need the same permissions.

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Get connection details

1
Open the database in the PlanetScale dashboard and click Connect.
2
Optionally, select the branch you want to connect to.
3
Select an existing role, or create a user-defined role with the permissions your application needs.
4
Under Connection target, choose a router group. The default router group is selected by default.
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To send queries to read-only replicas, select Route queries to a replica. This option is separate from the router-group target.
6
Select your framework, language, or Postgres CLI, then copy the generated connection details.
The generated psql command has this form:
Replace the placeholders with the values from the dashboard. Generated connections use the postgres logical database within a cluster.

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Connection parameters

All connections to Neki databases use port 5432.

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Secure connections

Neki requires TLS. Your client should verify both the certificate chain and the server hostname instead of only encrypting the connection. The generated psql command uses sslmode=verify-full and the system CA store. Other drivers use different names for the same settings. Select your framework or language on the Connect page to get the correct TLS configuration for that client.

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Private connections

Keep traffic between your cloud network and Neki off the public internet with AWS PrivateLink or GCP Private Service Connect. Private connections use the same roles, router groups, and required TLS settings as public connections.

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Primary and replica routing

By default, Neki sends work to shard primaries. Use that for writes and for reads that need the latest committed data. Set __neki.target to send reads to replicas. Selecting Route queries to a replica on the Connect page adds this setting to the generated connection options. It does not change the username.
Or set it when the connection starts. For psql, use PGOPTIONS:
For a connection URI, add it as the Postgres options parameter:
For pscale shell, add --replica. That sets __neki.target=REPLICA for the session. See Choosing where reads run for Neki’s replica selection settings and lag behavior.

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Need help?

Get help from the PlanetScale Support team, or join our Discord community to see how others are using PlanetScale.