Summary: Cloudflare Hyperdrive proxies and accelerates Lakebase Postgres queries from Cloudflare Workers by routing requests through a globally distributed connection pool, reducing per-request connection latency for serverless workloads. Use this guide when you need to connect a Workers application (node-postgres or postgres.js) to Neon via Hyperdrive, including Wrangler binding setup and worker placement by region. Covers the sslmode=disable behavior in Hyperdrive local connection strings and how to test with wrangler dev --remote.

Connect Cloudflare Hyperdrive to your Lakebase Postgres database for faster queries

Cloudflare Hyperdrive is a serverless application that proxies queries to your database and accelerates them. It works by maintaining a globally distributed pool of database connections, and routing queries to the closest available connection.

This is specifically useful for serverless applications that cannot maintain a persistent database connection and need to establish a new connection for each request. Hyperdrive can significantly reduce the latency of these queries for your application users.

This guide demonstrates how to configure a Hyperdrive service to connect to your Lakebase Postgres database. It demonstrates how to implement a regular Workers application that connects to Neon directly and then replace that connection with a Hyperdrive connection to achieve performance improvements.

To follow along with this guide, you require:

• A Neon account. If you do not have one, sign up at Neon. Your Neon project comes with a ready-to-use Postgres database named neondb. We'll use this database in the following examples.

• A Cloudflare account. If you do not have one, sign up for Cloudflare Workers to get started.

  NOTE: You need to be on Cloudflare Workers' paid subscription plan to use Hyperdrive.

• Node.js and npm installed on your local machine. We'll use Node.js to build and deploy our Workers application.

1. Log in to the Neon Console and navigate to the Projects section.

2. Click the New Project button to create a new project.

3. From your project dashboard, navigate to Postgres database > SQL Editor from the sidebar, and run the following SQL command to create a new table in your database:

   CREATE TABLE books_to_read (
    id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
    title TEXT,
    author TEXT
   );

   Next, we insert some sample data into the books_to_read table, so we can query it later:

   INSERT INTO books_to_read (title, author)
   VALUES
       ('The Way of Kings', 'Brandon Sanderson'),
       ('The Name of the Wind', 'Patrick Rothfuss'),
       ('Coders at Work', 'Peter Seibel'),
       ('1984', 'George Orwell');

In the Neon Console, click Connect in the nav to open the Connect to your branch modal and find your database connection string. It should look similar to this:

postgresql://neondb_owner:AbC123dEf@ep-cool-darkness-123456.us-east-2.aws.neon.tech/neondb?sslmode=require&channel_binding=require

Keep your connection string handy for later use.

Run the following command in a terminal window to set up a new Cloudflare Workers project:

npm create cloudflare@latest

This initiates an interactive CLI prompt to generate a new project. To follow along with this guide, you can use the following settings:

├ In which directory do you want to create your application?
│ dir ./neon-hyperdrive-guide
│
├ What type of application do you want to create?
│ type "Hello World" Worker
│
├ Do you want to use TypeScript?
│ Yes typescript

When asked if you want to deploy your application, select no. We'll develop and test the application locally before deploying it to the Cloudflare Workers platform.

The create-cloudflare CLI also installs the Wrangler tool to manage the full workflow of testing and managing your Worker applications. To emulate the Node environment in the Workers runtime, we need to add the following entry to the wrangler.toml file.

#:schema node_modules/wrangler/config-schema.json
name = "with-hyperdrive"
main = "src/index.ts"
compatibility_date = "2024-12-05"
compatibility_flags = ["nodejs_compat"]

Navigate to the project directory and run the following command:

node-postgres

npm install pg
npm install -D @types/pg

postgres.js

npm install postgres

Now, you can update the src/index.js file in the project directory with the following code:

node-postgres

import pkg from 'pg';

const { Client } = pkg;

export default {
  async fetch(request, env, ctx) {
    const client = new Client({ connectionString: env.DATABASE_URL });
    await client.connect();
    const { rows } = await client.query('SELECT * FROM books_to_read');
    return new Response(JSON.stringify(rows));
  },
};

postgres.js

import postgres from 'postgres';

export default {
  async fetch(request, env, ctx) {
    const sql = postgres(env.DATABASE_URL);
    const rows = await sql`SELECT * FROM books_to_read`;
    return new Response(JSON.stringify(rows));
  },
};

The fetch handler defined above gets called when the worker receives an HTTP request. It will query the Neon database to fetch the full list of books in our to-read list.

First, you need to configure the DATABASE_URL environment variable to point to the Neon database. You can do this by creating a .dev.vars file at the root of the project directory with the following content:

DATABASE_URL=YOUR_NEON_CONNECTION_STRING

Now, to test the worker application locally, you can use the wrangler CLI which comes with the Cloudflare project setup.

npx wrangler dev

This command starts a local server and simulates the Cloudflare Workers environment. You can visit the printed URL in your browser to test the worker application. It should return a JSON response with the list of books from the books_to_read table.

With our Workers application able to query the database, we will now set up Cloudflare Hyperdrive to connect to Neon and accelerate the database queries.

You can use the Wrangler CLI to create a new Hyperdrive service, using your Neon database connection string from earlier:

npx wrangler hyperdrive create neon-guide-drive --connection-string=$NEON_DATABASE_CONNECTION_STRING

This command creates a new Hyperdrive service named neon-guide-drive and outputs its configuration details. Copy the id field from the output, which we will use next.

Cloudflare workers uses Bindings to interact with other resources on the Cloudflare platform. We will update the wrangler.toml file in the project directory to bind our Worker project to the Hyperdrive service.

Add the following lines to the wrangler.toml file. This lets us access the Hyperdrive service from our Worker application using the HYPERDRIVE binding.

[[hyperdrive]]
binding = "HYPERDRIVE"
id = $id-from-previous-step

Now, you can update the src/index.js file in the project directory to query the database, through the Hyperdrive service.

node-postgres

import pkg from 'pg';

const { Client } = pkg;

export default {
  async fetch(request, env, ctx) {
    const client = new Client({ connectionString: env.HYPERDRIVE.connectionString });
    await client.connect();
    const { rows } = await client.query('SELECT * FROM books_to_read');
    return new Response(JSON.stringify(rows));
  },
};

postgres.js

import postgres from 'postgres';

export default {
  async fetch(request, env, ctx) {
    const sql = postgres(env.HYPERDRIVE.connectionString);
    const rows = await sql`SELECT * FROM books_to_read`;
    return new Response(JSON.stringify(rows));
  },
};

By default, Workers run in the data center closest to where the request was received. If your Worker makes multiple round trips to your database, you can reduce latency by placing the Worker closer to your database instead.

You can specify the cloud region where your database is hosted by adding a placement in your wrangler.toml. For example, if your database is in AWS US East 1:

[placement]
region = "aws:us-east-1"

Or if your database is in Azure Germany West Central:

[placement]
region = "azure:germanywestcentral"

Now that we have updated the Worker script to use the Hyperdrive service, we can deploy the updated Worker to the Cloudflare Workers platform:

npx wrangler deploy

This command uploads the updated Worker script to the Cloudflare Workers platform and makes it available at a public URL. You can visit the URL in your browser to test that the application works.

To delete your Worker project, you can use the Cloudflare dashboard or run wrangler delete from your project directory, specifying your project name. Refer to the Wrangler documentation for more details.

To delete your Neon project, follow the steps outlined in the Neon documentation under Delete a project.

• Neon + Cloudflare Hyperdrive: Demonstrates using Cloudflare's Hyperdrive to access your Neon database from Cloudflare Workers

If you're using Postgres.js (or another library that requires SSL) with Neon and Hyperdrive, you might see an error like:

PostgresError: connection is insecure (try using sslmode=require)

This happens because the local connection string generated by Hyperdrive includes sslmode=disable. While this may look insecure, it's by design and your database connection is still secure:

• Hyperdrive terminates SSL inside Cloudflare's infrastructure.
• Your Worker connects to Hyperdrive over an internal .hyperdrive.local address; no SSL needed.
• Hyperdrive then connects to your database using the original connection string with sslmode=require, maintaining full SSL encryption upstream.

Connection path:

Worker → Hyperdrive (.hyperdrive.local, no SSL)
Hyperdrive → Neon Database (SSL enabled)

This setup works in production. But for local development, libraries like Postgres.js may still reject the connection due to the local sslmode=disable.

✅ To avoid this issue locally, use wrangler dev --remote. This runs your Worker in Cloudflare's infrastructure, where the connection string works as expected.

• Cloudflare Workers
• Cloudflare Hyperdrive
• Wrangler CLI
• Neon

• AskYourDatabase
• Draxlr
• Exograph
• Grafbase
• Hasura
• PostgREST
• WunderGraph

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