This package exposes a CLI command dbmd-gen-pg which generates database metadata from a PostgreSQL database and stores the metadata to a file in json format.

dbmd-gen-pg --conn-env <env-file>  <output-file>

To install and save as a development dependency:

npm install -D dbmd-pg

To run the generator, one way is to run directly from the command line via npx:

npx run dbmd-gen-pg

Another option is to add an npm script to your project that will be using the database metadata:

# in package.json:
"scripts": {
  "gen-dbmd": "dbmd-gen-pg --conn-env db/connection.env dbmd.json",
  ...

Then generate the metadata file with npm run gen-dbmd.

The connection environment file passed to conn-env should define the following environment variables:

PGHOST=<database-host-name>
PGDATABASE=<database-name>
PGUSER=<user>
PGPASSWORD=<password>
PGPORT=<database-port>

To build the package:

npm install
npm run build

If you are able to run Docker containers, you can easily try the database metadata generation against an included example database as follows.

npm run build-example-database
npm run example-database

Try connecting to the database via:

docker exec -it drugs-pg psql -U drugs

You should be able to execute a query such as select * from drug;. Enter \q to exit.

To generate database metadata for this example database:

npm run example

The database metadata will be written to file example/dbmd.json.