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Configure Lightdash to use an external database

Note: Lightdash requires a PostgreSQL database (version 12 or greater).

In production, we recommend using a managed database service (depending on your cloud provider). This ensures that your database is highly available and secure. You can also use a self-hosted database, but you will need to manage the database yourself.

The following configuration shows an example of how to configure Lightdash to use an external database. You can use this as a starting point for your own configuration.

Configuration options for external database​

# values.yaml

# Disable the internal database
postgresql:
  enabled: false

# Configure Lightdash to use an external database
externalDatabase:
  host: lightdash-db.mycompany.com
  port: 5432
  user: lightdash
  password: lightdash
  database: lightdash

Optionally you can pass any of the PostgreSQL Environment Variables to the configMap

Required pg extensions for external database​

Lightdash requires the following extensions to be installed on the database:

  • uuid-ossp - used for generating unique IDs

Migrations​

Migrations are ran automatically on starting the Lightdash server or workers. When upgrading Lightdash, migrations will be ran automatically. If migrations fail due to a pg_lock error, check for a table called knex_migrations_lock to manually release the lock.