Very nice! Going to check it out over the weekend.
Postgres Language Server: Initial Release
11–20 of 58 posts
Re: Postgres Language Server: Initial Release
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does a language server do? Asking for those who missed the memo.
The Language Server Protocol is essentially a standard for editors to talk to language tooling. All the usual refactor/go-to-definition/auto-complete functionality you expect from a modern IDE is implemented in a language-agnostic way in the editor in terms of calls to the language server, and language servers then provide the actual concrete implementations of that functionality. IIRC Microsoft defined the spec in t…
[deleted]
Re: Postgres Language Server: Initial Release
#13This is awesome. Does anyone know if it'll possible to integrate it with tools like SQLX (Rust's pseudo-ORM) to get type hinting when writing in-like SQL code within Rust, or just have it work when I'm writing SQL within a simple Python script? That would truly be next-gen.
Re: Postgres Language Server: Initial Release
#14>This project provides a toolchain for Postgres development,
I'm a little bit confused about what "Postgres development" is in this context. Is this for people writing stored procedures in Postgres? Or people writing other kinds of large and complex queries that merit language server support?
I'm just kind of curious what uses cases are out there for something like this.
Re: Postgres Language Server: Initial Release
#15Hey HN! We have released the initial version of the Postgres Language Server we started working on almost two years ago[0]. You can try it out by downloading the binary from the repo[1]. It is also available on npm, as a vscode extension and via nvim-lspconfig and mason.[2] We fell into plenty of rabbit holes along the way, but dug our way out of each. We're now using mostly pragmatic, almost naive solutions for our…
I suggest it would be helpful if the README's intro expanded a little more on the project's scope. "for postgres" is a bit vague, and "focusing on developer experience and reliable SQL tooling." doesn't tell me much about what it actually does.
If I was coming to this project for the first time I think the questions I'd immediately like the answers to are:
- What language is this language server for? Is it just for SQL proper, or for PL/pgSQL, or writing C extensions, or what?
- What makes it PostgreSQL-specific? Is it just that it follows PostgreSQL's dialect of SQL?
- Does it expect to be told about your database's schema? And if so, do you tell it by giving it a database connection, or letting it see files defining the schema, or what?
Re: Postgres Language Server: Initial Release
#16Hey HN! We have released the initial version of the Postgres Language Server we started working on almost two years ago[0]. You can try it out by downloading the binary from the repo[1]. It is also available on npm, as a vscode extension and via nvim-lspconfig and mason.[2] We fell into plenty of rabbit holes along the way, but dug our way out of each. We're now using mostly pragmatic, almost naive solutions for our…
> we started working on almost two years ago
Jesus, this really puts it into perspective how much effort JetBrains have put into their IDEs, which have had superb support for all popular SQL dialects for as long as I can remember. Thank you for providing the community with a FOSS alternative, because IIRC there wasn't anything remotely comparable to JetBrains up until now.
Re: Postgres Language Server: Initial Release
#17co-author here: The most interesting part is probably the parsing of SQL files.
The first issue is that the Postgres parser is complex and always changing, so you can't really roll your own parser to parse SQL. The second is that the parser only works with valid and complete SQL statements, but an LSP should help you with those that are invalid or incomplete.
The simple solution is to actually use two parsers – the original libpg_query that's used by Postgres itself, and tree-sitter for incomplete statements, and merge the parsed results. With that, you can both get a workable AST for diagnostics and tree-sitters CST for autocompletion, for example.
Re: Postgres Language Server: Initial Release
#18[deleted]
Re: Postgres Language Server: Initial Release
#19This is awesome. Does anyone know if it'll possible to integrate it with tools like SQLX (Rust's pseudo-ORM) to get type hinting when writing in-like SQL code within Rust, or just have it work when I'm writing SQL within a simple Python script? That would truly be next-gen.
that's something we are currently looking into for typescript. at first, I thought a tsserver plugin will do. but a bit of research suggested that such a plugin can not call other language servers. this must be solved on the editor side instead. in vscode, it should be possible via request forwarding [0]. for neovim there are plugins like otter.nvim [1].
and at least for js, we are planning to add direct support for it in our workspace api so that e.g. `postgrestools check file.ts` will emit diagnostics for embedded sql.
[0] https://code.visualstudio.com/api/language-extensions/embedd... [1] https://github.com/jmbuhr/otter.nvim
Re: Postgres Language Server: Initial Release
#20Hey HN! We have released the initial version of the Postgres Language Server we started working on almost two years ago[0]. You can try it out by downloading the binary from the repo[1]. It is also available on npm, as a vscode extension and via nvim-lspconfig and mason.[2] We fell into plenty of rabbit holes along the way, but dug our way out of each. We're now using mostly pragmatic, almost naive solutions for our…
I suggest it would be helpful if the README's intro expanded a little more on the project's scope. "for postgres" is a bit vague, and "focusing on developer experience and reliable SQL tooling." doesn't tell me much about what it actually does. If I was coming to this project for the first time I think the questions I'd immediately like the answers to are: - What language is this language server for? Is it just for S…
Thanks for the feedback. Good points, we'll improve the README.
Regarding your questions:
1. It's currently only for SQL statements, but we'll work on function bodies and PL/pgSQL soon. 2. Exactly, we follow the the PostgreSQL dialect (we use Postgres's parser) 3. You can give it a database connection and it will query some pg_catalog tables. If you don't provide connection details, we'll bypass features requiring that.