Connecting to a Database

Importing a Driver

In order to connect to a database, you need to import its driver first.

GORM wraps the drivers for the officially supported databases.

import _ "github.com/jinzhu/gorm/dialects/mysql"
// import _ "github.com/jinzhu/gorm/dialects/postgres"
// import _ "github.com/jinzhu/gorm/dialects/sqlite"
// import _ "github.com/jinzhu/gorm/dialects/mssql"

You can import other drivers in the same way.

import _ "github.com/go-sql-driver/mysql"

Supported Databases

MySQL

NOTE:

In order to handle time.Time correctly, you need to include parseTime as a parameter. (More supported parameters)

In order to fully support UTF-8 encoding, you need to change charset=utf8 to charset=utf8mb4. See this article for a detailed explanation.

import (
  "github.com/jinzhu/gorm"
  _ "github.com/jinzhu/gorm/dialects/mysql"
)

func main() {
  db, err := gorm.Open("mysql", "user:password@/dbname?charset=utf8&parseTime=True&loc=Local")
  defer db.Close()
}

If you want to specify the host, you need to use (). Example:

user:password@(localhost)/dbname?charset=utf8&parseTime=True&loc=Local

PostgreSQL

import (
  "github.com/jinzhu/gorm"
  _ "github.com/jinzhu/gorm/dialects/postgres"
)

func main() {
  db, err := gorm.Open("postgres", "host=myhost port=myport user=gorm dbname=gorm password=mypassword")
  defer db.Close()
}

SQLite3

NOTE: You can also use file::memory:?cache=shared instead of a path to a file. This will tell SQLite to use a temporary database in system memory. (See SQLite docs for this.)

import (
  "github.com/jinzhu/gorm"
  _ "github.com/jinzhu/gorm/dialects/sqlite"
)

func main() {
  db, err := gorm.Open("sqlite3", "/tmp/gorm.db")
  defer db.Close()
}

SQL Server

Microsoft offers a guide for using SQL Server with Go (and GORM).

import (
  "github.com/jinzhu/gorm"
  _ "github.com/jinzhu/gorm/dialects/mssql"
)

func main() {
  db, err := gorm.Open("mssql", "sqlserver://username:password@localhost:1433?database=dbname")
  defer db.Close()
}

Unsupported Databases

GORM officially supports the databases listed above, but you can write GORM dialects for unsupported databases.