Creating connections

Open the connection manager from the toolbar (Connections) or Connection → Manage Connections, then click New Connection.

The dialog has three tabs: 🔌 Basic, 🔒 SSL/TLS and 🔐 SSH Tunnel. Only the first is required — the other two are covered in SSL/TLS and SSH tunnel.

Basic settings

Field	Notes
Database type	MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, SQLite or MSSQL
Connection name	Free text, e.g. Production MySQL
Host / Port	Port is filled in automatically: 3306, 3306, 5432, 1433
Username / Password	Stored locally on your machine
Database	Optional. Leave empty to see every database on the server
Group	Optional label such as Production, Dev, Testing
Card colour	A colour tag for the connection in the tree
Queries folder	Optional folder of .sql files — see below
Display timezone offset	Minutes from UTC used when showing datetime columns, e.g. 120 for UTC+2

For SQLite there is no host or port — you pick the database file instead.

Pasting a connection string

Instead of filling in fields, paste a connection string into the Connection string box and click Load. The fields are filled from it:

mysql://user:password@host:3306/dbname
postgres://user:password@host:5432/dbname
sqlite:///absolute/path/to/file.db

If the string cannot be parsed, NabuSQL says so and leaves the form untouched.

SQL Server specifics

Microsoft SQL Server connections have two extras:

• Authentication — SQL (username and password) or Windows for integrated authentication using the account you are logged in as.
• Named Pipe — on Windows you can give a pipe path instead of host and port, and the connection uses Named Pipes as transport.

Testing

Test Connection attempts a real connection and reports either the server version or the exact error the server returned. Do this before saving — it saves a round of guessing later.

The queries folder

If you set Queries folder to, say, C:\NabuSQL\queries, then NabuSQL looks for .sql files in C:\NabuSQL\queries\{database}\ and lists them in the sidebar under Queries for that database.

These file-backed queries are read-only inside NabuSQL — the sidebar marks them From file (read only). Edit them in your editor of choice, or keep them in version control, and NabuSQL picks up the changes. Right-click the Queries group to open the folder.

Queries you save from the SQL editor without a queries folder are stored inside NabuSQL itself and can be renamed and deleted from the sidebar.

Where connections are stored

All connections live in connections.json in the application-data directory (%APPDATA%\com.nabusql.app on Windows). To move them to another machine, use the encrypted export described in Moving connections and queries rather than copying the file.