Neon: step-by-step

Step by step

Follow along

1. 1

   Sign up for a free account

   Go to console.neon.tech/signup and create an account with your email, GitHub, or Google. The free plan includes a single project with a production branch and auto-scaling compute.

2. 2

   Create your first project

   After sign-up, the onboarding wizard prompts you to create a Project — the top-level container for your branches and databases. Give it a name, choose a region, and Neon automatically provisions a 'production' branch with a database called 'neondb'.

3. 3

   Run queries in the SQL Editor

   Open the SQL Editor from the left sidebar in the Neon Console. Your 'production' branch and 'neondb' database are pre-selected; click Run to execute queries directly in the browser without installing any local tools.

4. 4

   Create a development branch

   Navigate to the Branches page and click 'Create branch', name it 'development', and select 'production' as the parent. Neon instantly clones your production data into an isolated copy you can safely modify.

5. 5

   Install the Neon CLI and connect locally

   Install the CLI with 'brew install neonctl' (macOS) or 'npm install -g neonctl', then run 'neon auth' to authenticate via browser. Use 'neon connection-string development --psql' to open a psql session directly to your branch.

6. 6

   Compare branches with Schema Diff

   After making schema changes on your development branch, go to the Branches page, open the branch detail, and click 'Open schema diff'. Select the two branches to compare and click Compare to see a GitHub-style diff of schema changes.

7. 7

   Reset your branch to production

   When you are done with an experiment, run 'neon branches reset development --parent --project-id <your-project-id>' to discard all changes and return the branch to the current state of production.