Postgres to Docs

Make your database documentation smooth by generating markdown for your schema. You need to get a quick and easy overview of your database schema but don't want to...

• Open the source code and find the model definitions
• Start your database and service, install dependencies, have a proper configuration, and open an external tool like TablePlus or DBeaver
• Read through your migrations directory to find the latest version of your schema
• Look through external documentation that might be out of date

Features

postgres-to-docs generates comprehensive documentation for your PostgreSQL database schema:

Documentation Elements

• Tables
  • Primary Keys
  • Foreign Keys
  • Nullable fields
  • Default values
  • Column comments
• Views
  • Column definitions
  • View comments
• User-defined Types
  • Composite types
  • Enums
• Functions
  • Full signatures
  • Arguments and return types
  • Function definitions
  • Language and volatility
• Row Level Security (RLS) Policies
  • Policy definitions
  • USING expressions
  • WITH CHECK expressions
  • Applicable roles
• Entity Relationship Diagrams
  • Mermaid.js format
  • Visual representation of relationships
  • Table structure visualization

Output Formats

• Markdown
  • Clean, readable documentation
  • Table of Contents
  • Hyperlinked references
  • Optional pure markdown mode (no HTML)
• LLM-optimized JSON
  • Structured schema information
  • Complete metadata
  • Optimized for AI consumption
  • Includes schema statistics

Configuration Options

• Output Control
  • folder: Output directory (default: "docs")
  • fileName: Base name for output files (default: "schema")
  • pureMarkdown: Generate clean markdown without HTML
  • llmFormat: Generate additional LLM-friendly JSON format
• Content Filtering
  • includeTables: List of tables to include
  • excludeTables: List of tables to exclude
  • includeTypes: Include user-defined types
  • includeRLS: Include RLS policies
  • includeFunctions: Include function definitions
  • includeDiagram: Include ER diagram
  • includeToc: Include table of contents
• Database Connection
  • Support for connection string or individual parameters
  • Environment variable support through .env files

Usage

1. Install through npm

   npm install @klarna/postgres-to-docs

2. Define a postgrestodocs.json config file

   {
       "host": "localhost",
       "port": 5432,
       "user": "user",
       "password": "password",
       "database": "database",
       "schema": "public",
       "folder": "docs",
       "fileName": "schema",
       "includeTables": [],
       "exludeTables": [],
       "includeTypes": true,
       "pureMarkdown": false,
       "includeRLS": true,
       "includeToc": true,
       "includeFunctions": true,
       "includeDiagram": true,
       "llmFormat": false
   }

3. Run the tool

   postgres-to-docs

Environment Variables

You can use environment variables to avoid storing sensitive database credentials in your configuration file. The tool supports both .env and .env.local files, with .env.local taking precedence.

Create a .env or .env.local file or add the following to your existing .env file:

# Database connection string
DB_STRING=postgresql://user:password@localhost:5432/database

The tool will:

1. Look for .env.local first (good for local development overrides)
2. Then look for .env (good for team-shared defaults)
3. Use DB_STRING to override the connection parameters if found
4. Fall back to the explicit values in the config file if DB_STRING is not found

Best Practice: Add .env.local to your .gitignore file to keep sensitive credentials out of version control:

.env.local

CLI Options

All configuration options can be overridden via CLI arguments:

postgres-to-docs --folder=my-docs --fileName=my-schema --llmFormat=true

Development

Clone the repo, then:

npm install
npm run start:dev

How to contribute

See our guide on contributing.

Release History

See our changelog.

License

Copyright © 2021 Klarna Bank AB

For license details, see the LICENSE file in the root of this project.

Contributors:

• @hankanman