Show HN: Bun-sqlgen – Type-safe raw SQL for Bun, no ORM

Can you make it work/ does it work with Porsager-Postgres in modnes which buns Postgres client is «based on»?

	▲	ilbert an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I think with some tweaks to the TS parser that goes and looks for the sql statements it's doable. How are you solving the problem right now?

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sHooKDT an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nice project, thanks! I was looking for something like that for quite a while.

Any chance to get it to work with Node?

Unfortunately in my opinion and experience Bun is not really suitable for production. Does it have anything special which makes this possible?

	▲	tomComb 7 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yes, bun is good locally, but need node support for deployment. So while the bun specific stuff sounds great I feel I need to avoid it.
	▲	ilbert an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I was targeting Bun because I really like its built-in SQL module. I can tweak the TS parser to look for e.g. postgres.js tagged template functions and make it work for that as well. I don't really see any blockers

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psc007 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Support for postgis?

	▲	ilbert an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The cli config supports specifying the PGLite extensions (the codegen uses PGLite as an in-memory light postgres), see this example: https://github.com/ilbertt/bun-sqlgen/tree/main/examples/wit.... You'll still probably have to manually override some column types using PG comments like: https://github.com/ilbertt/bun-sqlgen/blob/dee757ebc9c38aec7... PGLite extensions: https://pglite.dev/extensions/#postgis

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danr4 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

pretty cool

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ilbert 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I write Bun.sql with raw SQL and no ORM, and the one thing I kept missing was types. You write a query, get back `any[]`, and hand-write a row type that silently drifts from the actual columns. Drizzle/Kysely fix this by moving the query into TypeScript, but then you're not really writing SQL anymore.

bun-sqlgen goes the other way. You keep writing raw SQL queries, just give each one a name.

A codegen step reads your migration `.sql` files, stands up a throwaway Postgres via PGlite (so no Docker) or SQLite, prepares every tagged query against it, and writes a `.d.ts` that maps each query name to its real result type. After that, plain `tsc` does the rest: `user.notExistingField` won't compile, and `display_name.length` gets flagged because the column is nullable.

Nullability was the annoying part. Postgres's describe doesn't hand you per-column nullability, so I infer it from the query plan plus the catalog, with manual overrides for the cases that genuinely can't be inferred. SQLite works too.

The runtime stays 100% Bun.sql, the generated file is the only artifact (commit it), and codegen is fast enough to rerun on save.

It's early (v0.1, built it for my own projects) so I'd mostly like to hear where it falls over.

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trollbridge 30 minutes ago | parent [-]

Can you describe how it's the same and how it's different than SQLx (a Rust thing)?

	▲	ilbert 24 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I actually took a lot of inspiration from sqlx, which is really nice. The main differences are: - in JS/TS you don't have compile-time scripts that you can run like with Rust's macros, so you need to run a codegen command before running the type checks (disadvantage) - I had to create a TS parser that goes and finds the tagged template functions with the sql statements, while sqlx has them "for free" because sql statements are the input to the macro itself (disadvantage) - I use an in-memory Postgres (PGLite) to describe the queries, instead of requiring a running pg instance (advantage) - I don't cache the statements and codegen for now like sqlx does, something that can be added later I think they are similar in that they both substitute the dynamic params with no-ops like $1, $2, etc. before handing the sql statement to the pg's DESCRIBE function