Integrate Your Google Cloud Platform Databases with Your Wix Site

Wix allows users to connect an external database to Wix sites using an external database adaptor. Once the connection is set up, users can interact with these databases and use them to populate site elements as though they were Wix CMS collections.

With an external database adaptor, you can use your database hosted on GCP (Google Cloud Platform), and fully integrate it into your Wix site. This means your GCP data can be managed via the Wix Data APIs (REST|SDK), and used (with or without datasets) to populate Wix UI elements like repeatersand tables.

Overview

This article walks you through the following steps:

1. Create secrets to securely store your database credentials.
2. Create and deploy a new Cloud Run service to host the Wix database adaptor.
3. Test Your Service
4. Connect your Wix site to your database.

This tutorial assumes you already have your own database on GCP with a table containing some data. If you don't have this set up, refer to the GCP documentation for instructions.

This tutorial uses a container image with all the functionality needed to interface between your database and your Wix site. If you want to look under the hood, you can have a look at the service plugin specifications for external database collections, and an overview of what's involved in building your own adaptor.

Supported Databases

Wix currently supports the following GCP databases:

• Cloud SQL for MySQL
• Cloud SQL for Postgres
• Cloud SQL for Microsoft SQL Server
• Google BigQuery
• Google Cloud Spanner

Step 1 | Create secrets to securely store your database credentials

The external database adaptor requires you to set some environment variables. Some of these variables, like the DB credentials, are sensitive and shouldn't be visible. Use the GCP Secret Manager to store and access these variables securely.

Configure Secrets

Store the following secret values for all databases:

• SECRET_KEY

A secret key that is used when connecting your Wix site to the adaptor. To create a level of authentication between your site and the adaptor, each request your site sends to the adaptor contains this value in the payload.

• PERMISSIONS (optional)

A JSON object that defines the read and write permissions for the tables in your database.

If you don't set permissions, they default to admin. With admin permissions, only site admins can read or write to the external database from a Wix site. API calls or CMS connections to the database don't work for anyone who isn't a site admin. This means site code that communicates with the external database might not work for site visitors.

When setting up permissions, make sure you use the ID of the table you want to read and write to, and not the database ID.

Database-Specific Secrets Configuration

In addition to the secrets above, each database requires its own specific secret configurations:

Create Secrets

To create the secrets, go to the GCP Secret Manager and create a secret with the appropriate configuration.

To create a PERMISSIONS secret, instead of entering a Secret value, provide the .json file that contains your permission settings.

Step 2 | Create and deploy a new Cloud Run service to host the Wix database adaptor

Next, deploy the external database adaptor as a service on Cloud Run. To do this, you'll need to create the service using a prebuilt container, configured secrets, and environment variables. Then you'll need to configure the database connections.

For further details on any of the instructions below, see the Google Cloud Run documentation.

Create a Service

Create a new service for your cloud run project with the following configuration:

1. Enter the following as the Container Image URL:

   Copy

   The Service name will default to velo-external-db.

2. Select the All for Autoscaling, and select Allow unauthenticated invocations for Authentication.

Configure Access Roles, Secrets, and Environment Variables

Configure the secrets that you defined earlier as environment variables for the service. To do this, perform the following steps:

1. Create a new service account that will run the Cloud Run service.

2. Grant access roles to the new account.

3. Create environment variables and assign the secrets' values.

4. Set the Service account name. We recommend you set the Service account name to match the Cloud Run instance name so that you can easily know which account is used by which instance.

5. Grant the following roles to the service account according to your database:

   All Databases:

   • Secret Manager Secret Accessor

   MySQL, Postgres, MsSQL:

   • Cloud SQL Editor

   BigQuery:

   • BigQueryAdmin

   Spanner:

   • Cloud Spanner Database User

6. Define 2 environment variables according to your database.

   The names and values for the variables are as follows:

   NAME	VALUE
   TYPE	MySQL database: **mysql **Postgres database: postgres MsSQL server database: mssql BigQuery database: bigquery Spanner database: spanner
   CLOUD_VENDOR	Google Cloud Platform: gcp

7. Make the secrets you configured and created in step 1 accessible to Cloud Run by adding the secrets information and exposing them as a environmental variables. Refer to the table above to see which secrets your database needs. For each secret, assign the environment variable the same name as the secret and ensure you've selected the latest version.

Configure the Database Connection

Deploy the container.

Get the cloud run service's URL. This URL is used to connect to your database adaptor service and to configure the external collection on your Wix site.

Note: If you change the value of a secret, you must redeploy the service for the new value to take effect.

Step 3 | Test Your Service

You can test that your service is working by making a quick request using Curl.

Use the Curl command below, replacing the URL with your URL from Step 2 above, and replacing the  secretKey value with your secret.

The output provides a list of tables and their columns from your database. If you have python installed, you can pipe the output to  python -m json.tool and it will give you nicely formatted JSON.

The formatted output contains the list of tables and their columns from your database.

Step 4 | Connect your Wix site to your database

Now that you have a database and an adaptor service, you're ready to add the database as an external collection on your site.

1. Go to the Databases section of the Code sidebar (Wix Editor) or the Code sidebar (Wix Studio).

2. Click the icon next to External Databases and select Add external database.

   

3. Choose Google Cloud as the cloud provider of the external collection being added, then click Next.

   

4. Enter a name for your external collection's namespace.

5. Copy and paste your adaptor service's URL into the endpoint URL field.

6. Enter your database adaptor's secret key.

7. Click Connect.

   

   The collection displays the tables. If your table contains the _id, _createdDate, _updatedDate, and _owner fields, you can add data to the table directly from the CMS.

   

The external connection and its collections are displayed under External Databases.

You can now use the Wix Data API with this collection as well as connect repeaters and tables to your MySQL, Postgres, MsSQL, BigQuery, and Spanner databases.

Try the following Wix Javascript SDK code to query your external data using your collection name and table name: