Connecting to database

In order to connect to a database, you need to import the database’s driver first. For example:

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

GORM has wrapped some drivers to make it easier to remember the import path. So you could import the mysql driver with:

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"

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 :memory: instead of a path to a file. This will tell sqlite to use a temporary database in system memory. This is especially useful when writing tests for your application against GORM, your tests to hit an actual database, but also be performant as the database is located in memory.

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

Get started with SQL Server, it can run on your Mac, Linux with Docker

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 above four databases, you could write dialects for unsupported databases, refer GORM Dialects