pRESTd

Unit tests Go Reference Go Report Card codecov Homebrew Discord

pREST (PostgreSQL REST) is a production-ready API that delivers instant REST and Model Context Protocol (MCP) APIs on top of your existing or new Postgres database—CRUD, custom SQL routes, auth, ACL, and a read-only MCP endpoint—without hand-writing a backend.

PostgreSQL version 9.5 or higher

Contributor License Agreement — CLA assistant

Documentation

Full documentation lives at docs.prestd.com.

Topic Link
Get pREST (Docker, Homebrew, Go) Get pREST
Configuration Configuring pREST
API reference API Reference
MCP over HTTP MCP over HTTP
Multi-database Multi-database
Databases & roadmap Databases · Roadmap
AI clients (Cursor, Claude, …) AI and MCP

Quick start

Install and run options (Docker, Homebrew, or Go) are documented in Get pREST. Point pREST at Postgres (PREST_PG_URL or pg.* / DATABASE_URL), then call:

GET /{database}/{schema}/{table}

See Configuring pREST for auth, ACL, custom queries, and MCP.

1-Click Deploy

Heroku

Deploy to Heroku and get a realtime RESTful API backed by Heroku Postgres:

Deploy to Heroku

More: Deploy in Heroku.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. See the Development Guide and Contributing to pREST. Please sign the CLA.

Questions? GitHub Discussions or Discord.

Testing

Run unit tests locally:

make test-unit

Run integration suites inside Docker (no local Postgres required):

# Postgres (full stack: default, auth, multicluster, queries) — also: make test-integration
make test-integration-postgres

# TimescaleDB (Timescale-specific E2E only)
make test-integration-timescaledb

Or with Docker Compose:

docker compose -f integration/postgres/docker-compose.yml up -d --wait \
  postgres postgres-b db-init prestd prestd-multicluster prestd-auth prestd-queries
docker compose -f integration/postgres/docker-compose.yml run --rm --no-deps tests
docker compose -f integration/postgres/docker-compose.yml down -v --remove-orphans

Postgres compose runs ./integration/suites/... and ./integration/postgres/.... TimescaleDB compose runs ./integration/timescaledb/... only (see .github/workflows/test-integration-timescaledb.yml). Network tests require PREST_TEST_URL (and flavor-specific URLs for the Postgres job); outside Compose those tests skip when the URLs are unset.

Example: Docker Build

Build the Docker image locally for development (compiles from source):

docker build -t prest/prest:latest .

For release builds, GoReleaser uses the same Dockerfile / Dockerfile.noplugins with a pre-built prestd binary. Local source builds can pass version metadata via build arguments:

docker build \
  --build-arg VERSION=v1.0.0 \
  --build-arg COMMIT=hash \
  --build-arg DATE=2026-02-11 \
  -t prest/prest:latest .