21 December 2023

How to Use Cloudflare Workers with DigitalOcean's Managed Postgres Database

There's nothing crazy about using Cloudflare Workers with Postgresql. Although Cloudflare (CF) has now D1 and partnerships with multiple serverless database providers, there are still tons of advantages to using a simple PostgreSQL (PSQL) database:

Performance: an instance of PSQL is much faster than most serverless options (less overhead), even from the other side of the world.
Cost: in my experience, on a simple 1vCPU instance you can usually do a lot more than with a serverless database, which would end up costing you more. Even Planetscale's plans start with a fraction of a vCPU (an 8th).
Security: you can control the security of your database much more easily than with a serverless database. You can set up your own firewall rules, and even use a VPN to connect to your database.

Now, you don't want to self-manage a database when you can have find options to get started, DigitalOcean starts at 15$/month. The time you save, security guarantees you get, are worth much more than that. Even for small projects, you can host several databases in a single instance, and you can always scale up when you need to. No excuses.

DigitalOcean's Managed Postgres is a great option for this. It's easy to set up, and you can connect to it from anywhere. You can also use it with CF Workers, which is what we're going to talk about in this article.

Although they have good options, DigitalOcean is still not fully into 2024 and don't support things like IPv6 in many of their products. This create connectivity issues with Cloudflare Workers, which only support IPv6. If you try to connect directly from a Worker to a Managed Postgres instance, you'll get an error.

The way to circumvent this is to use CF's new Hyperdrive feature. Hyperdrive is orginially designed to optimize your database connections, by both pooling and caching results. But it also has the hidden advantage of supporting IPv4 connections.

If you try to connect to your DigitialOcean PSQL database using Hyperdrive from a CF Worker, then it's all solved! You can use the same connection string you would use for a normal PSQL connection, and it will work.