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Introduction

Laravel Serverless Postgres provides a fully managed, autoscaling Postgres database for your application. Serverless Postgres database clusters autoscale their compute resources and storage to match demand from your application. Laravel Serverless Postgres supports a wide range of PostgreSQL extensions, including pgvector for AI and vector similarity search. To learn more about storing and searching vector embeddings with pgvector, see Neon’s pgvector documentation.

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Creating Serverless Postgres databases

To create and attach a Serverless Postgres database to an environment:
  1. Navigate to your environment’s infrastructure canvas dashboard.
  2. Click “Add database”.
  3. Select an existing database cluster or create a new one.
    • To create a new cluster: Select the “Laravel Serverless Postgres” type at the Postgres version you want, then configure:
      • Cluster name: A unique name for your database cluster
      • Region: Must match your compute cluster’s region
      • Configuration: Choose a preset, or customize the compute unit range the cluster autoscales between, when it scales to zero, and how many days of point-in-time recovery backups to retain
  4. Select an existing database within the cluster or create a new one.
    • Database name: The name of the database within the cluster
Laravel Cloud selects the newest supported Postgres version by default. You do not configure storage up front. Storage autoscales with the data your application stores.
You can also create Serverless Postgres databases from your organization’s Resources page, but you will need to attach them to an environment separately.
Once you create the database, you can attach it to any environment in the same region. After you attach a database to an environment, redeploy the environment for the changes to take effect. Visit the pricing docs for information on compute and storage prices by region.

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Database clusters vs. databases

When you create a new database cluster, Laravel Cloud asks for the name of the cluster and the name of the initial “database” to create within it. Each database cluster may contain up to 500 databases. In web development, these databases are sometimes called “schemas”. If your application needs more than 500 databases, create an additional database cluster and distribute your databases across clusters. Environments attach to a database, not to a cluster. When you attach one, you first choose the database cluster. Then you select the database within it that you want to make available through the DB_DATABASE environment variable.

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Editing and resizing database clusters

To edit your database clusters and adjust their compute and storage settings, navigate to Organization > Resources > Databases and click the … icon for the database cluster you would like to edit or resize. Then, click Edit settings. Changing the compute unit range restarts your cluster’s compute and briefly drops existing connections. Autoscaling within the configured range does not restart the compute.

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Monitoring database cluster metrics

To view your database cluster’s metrics, navigate to Organization > Resources > Databases, click the database cluster card, and review the Metrics section. Use the time range selector to adjust the period shown.

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Deleting database clusters

To delete a database cluster, navigate to Organization > Resources > Databases and click the … icon for the database cluster you would like to delete. Then, click Delete and confirm your action.

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Compute units

When you create a Laravel Serverless Postgres database cluster, you may configure the range of “compute units” your cluster scales between based on demand. Compute units correspond to the following vCPU and RAM configurations: The maximum compute units available to your cluster depend on your plan. On the Growth plan, clusters may scale up to 4 CU by default. If you need more compute units, contact support to request a higher limit.

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Connection pooler

Laravel Serverless Postgres offers connection pooling through pgbouncer, which supports up to 10,000 concurrent connections to your cluster. To connect to the pgbouncer endpoint of your database cluster, append -pooler to the first segment of the cluster’s host name. For example, if your database cluster’s host name is ep-frosty-shadow-a57j6ubb.us-east-2.pg.laravel.cloud, the corresponding pgbouncer endpoint is ep-frosty-shadow-a57j6ubb-pooler.us-east-2.pg.laravel.cloud. Then, add the new host name as the DB_HOST environment variable in your environment’s General Settings:

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Scale-to-zero

You may configure Laravel Serverless Postgres database clusters to scale to zero automatically after they receive no queries for a given number of seconds. While a Serverless Postgres cluster sleeps, you are not billed for its compute resources. If the cluster receives a query while it is sleeping, it wakes up automatically within a few hundred milliseconds.

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Autoscaling compute

Serverless compute can autoscale up and down based on your database cluster’s utilization. Set a minimum and maximum range, and pay only for the compute resources you need.

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Connecting to database clusters

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From your application

When you attach a database to an environment, Laravel Cloud automatically injects database connection environment variables, including DB_HOST, DB_USERNAME, DB_PASSWORD, and DB_DATABASE. You may view these variables in your environment’s General Settings.

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From your local machine

To connect to your database from your local machine using a database management client like TablePlus, navigate to Organization > Resources > Databases, click your database cluster, and click View credentials at the top of the page. To view credentials for a specific database, use its … > View credentials menu in the Databases section.
The credentials dialog provides the connection details for your database. Use the Open in database client button in the Deeplink field to open your database in your local machine’s default database management client, if you have one installed.

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Postgres SSL connections

Neon, which powers Laravel Serverless Postgres, uses the public ISRG Root X1 certificate issued by Let’s Encrypt. So you can create an SSL connection to your Postgres cluster using the appropriate CA certificate for your operating system. If you are using macOS, this certificate should already be at /etc/ssl/cert.pem.

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Troubleshooting

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Too many connections

Postgres rejects new connections once your cluster reaches its connection limit. This usually happens when many app instances, queue workers, or background processes each hold their own connections at the same time. To resolve this error, connect through the connection pooler, which supports up to 10,000 concurrent connections. You may also reduce the number of replicas or worker processes connecting to the database. If the error persists, contact support.

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High CPU usage

If your cluster’s Metrics show sustained high CPU usage, or your cluster regularly runs at its maximum compute units, raise the maximum of its compute unit range. Slow or unindexed queries are also a common cause. Laravel Nightwatch can show you which queries are slowest and where in your application they run.