Troubleshooting binary size and deployment issues

If you encounter large bundle sizes, slow builds, or deployment errors related to Prisma’s Rust engine binaries, for example, in serverless or edge environments, the issue may be caused by the default native Rust query engine that ships with Prisma Client.

As of v6.16.0, you can resolve these issues by removing the Rust-based engine binary from Prisma ORM by configuring your generator block as follows:

generator client {
  provider   = "prisma-client"
  output     = "./generated"
  engineType = "client"
}

:::note Note that you need to use a driver adapter in this case. :::

With this architecture:

• No Rust query engine binary is downloaded or shipped.
• The database connection pool is maintained by the native JS database driver you install (e.g., @prisma/adapter-pg for PostgreSQL).

This setup can help if you are:

• Deploying to serverless functions or edge runtimes
• Running in read-only filesystem environments
• Working within CI/CD pipelines with strict size limits

Visit this page for complete setup instructions and supported databases.

Curious why we moved away from the Rust engine? Take a look at why we transitioned from Rust binary engines to an all-TypeScript approach for a faster, lighter Prisma ORM in this blog post.