Connections

A connection is a name, an environment and the settings Recern needs to reach a database. Connections are saved on your computer. Passwords are not part of them: they are kept in the system keychain.

Environments

Every connection has an environment: Local, Development, Staging or Production. The sidebar groups connections by environment, and the dashboard shows production first.

A new Production connection gets Safe Mode turned on. You can turn it off in the connection settings, but Recern warns that it could then change data on that server. See Safe Mode and the console.

PostgreSQL

Setting	Notes
Host and port	5432 by default.
User and database	The database Recern opens first.
Password	Stored in the system keychain.
TLS	Disable, or Require: the connection is encrypted and the server certificate is verified.

The Queries view needs the pg_stat_statements extension in the database. Without it, the Queries tab does not appear, and the other views work as usual.

Redis, Valkey and Dragonfly

Setting	Notes
Host and port	6379 by default.
User	Optional, for servers with ACL users.
Password	Optional. Stored in the system keychain.
TLS	Disable or Require.

Recern names its connections Recern with CLIENT SETNAME, so they are easy to spot in the Clients view and on the server.

Recern Vector

A Recern Vector connection is a path to a .rvec file. Recern loads the file into memory and reads it again when it changes on disk, so the application that owns the file can keep writing to it. Recern never writes to the file.

Passwords

Passwords are stored in the system keychain under the connection's id and are never written to the configuration file. Deleting a connection deletes its password too.

Through a bastion

To reach a database that is only visible from a private network, add an SSH tunnel to the connection. See SSH tunnels.