Environment Variables & Your Database

How to connect your own Postgres database (BYODB) to a Launchpad project, set encrypted environment variables, and configure preview databases.

Bring your own database (BYODB)

Launchpad is built around BYODB: your CMS's actual content always lives in a database you control -- Supabase, Neon, a self-hosted Postgres, or anything else that speaks Postgres. Launchpad never stores, backs up, or has standing access to your content; it only runs your application container against the connection string you provide.

This keeps you in full control of your data and means there's no migration or lock-in risk if you ever decide to leave.

Setting your database connection

From your project's Environment Variables tab, add a DATABASE_URL variable pointing at your own database. This is used for your production environment.

For preview deployments (PRs and, if enabled, branch deploys), set a separate PREVIEW_DATABASE_URL -- switch to the preview kind at the top of the Environment Variables tab to set this. One preview database is shared across all of a project's previews/branch deploys; it is never the same database as production.

How env vars are stored

Every environment variable value is encrypted at rest (AES-256-GCM) and only decrypted at deploy time, when it's injected into your running container. Values are never shown back to you after being set -- only the variable's key name is visible in the dashboard, the same way most platforms handle secrets.

Database region

Under your project's Settings, you can tell Launchpad where your database is actually hosted (e.g. AP-Southeast, US-East). This is purely informational -- it doesn't provision or move anything -- but if your database is far from Singapore (where Launchpad's infrastructure runs), you'll see a latency warning so you know what to expect.