According to its official description, “Sequelize is a promise-based Node.js ORM for Postgres, MySQL, MariaDB, SQLite and Microsoft SQL Server.” Sequelize is widely used in Node.js web applications to abstract the database layer. I recently found a “corner case” for Sequelize which is possible to accomplish, but is not well documented anywhere on the web. I need to use Sequelize to connect to a MySQL server via a UNIX socket. I’m developing some plugins for Confluence that use the atlassian-connect-express toolkit, which has a datastore that wraps Sequelize. The way Atlassian has chosen to wrap Sequelize is rather unfortunate, probably because they are trying to maintain backwards compatibility with JugglingDB. Essentially, the Atlassian Connect Express only looks at the URL, and ignores any option passed to Sequelize. Therefore, you have to pass everything you need via the URL, and this is where it’s tricky. Here’s the form of the URL that you need to connect to MySQL via a UNIX socket with Sequelize:

Google Cloud SQL recently introduced the capability for an instance to have an IP address within the private address space of your VPC network. Previously, all Cloud SQL instances had IP addresses within the address space of the public Internet. Obviously, the public IP was a security and privacy concern, as well as a potential violation of some compliance and governance frameworks. Now, each instance may have a public IP, private IP, or both. There’s another potential benefit to using a private IP address: performance!

The Laravel/Lumen framework documentation does not explain how to connect an application to a database using UNIX sockets instead of a TCP-based network connection. I recently had to configure the Polr URL shortener (built on the Lumen microframework by Laravel) to connect to Google Cloud SQL with a UNIX socket. Since all of Polr’s configuration takes place in the .env file, and there is no environment variable that’s specific to database sockets, this took some research. I finally found the answer in an obscure StackOverflow response. Previous TCP connection: [code] DB_HOST=some-server-name DB_PORT=3306 [/code] Socket-based SQL connection: [code] DB_HOST=localhost;unix_socket=/cloudsql/cloud-project-name:us-east1:sql-instance-name [/code] This approach will work with any UNIX socket; you just need to give it the absolute path to the socket.