[Bug]: Breaking Change: cities.json Removed – prisma/seed.ts Now Fails with 404

[SourabhBhanwala]

Issue Type

Other

Location (if applicable)

prisma/seed.ts

What's wrong?

Reproduction

Using the current implementation in prisma/seed.ts:

const cities = await fetchData('cities');

This resolves internally to the following endpoint:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dr5hn/countries-states-cities-database/master/json/cities.json

The request now returns:

404: Not Found

Root Cause

The repository no longer contains the file:

json/cities.json

Instead, only the compressed version is available:

json/cities.json.gz

Since the existing seeder logic expects an uncompressed .json file and does not handle gzip decompression, the request fails and results in a 404 error.

What should it be?

Update prisma/seed.ts

Modify the seeder to:

Fetch .json.gz

Decompress using zlib

Parse JSON

Example fix:

import { gunzipSync } from 'zlib';

async function fetchGzipJson(endpoint: string) {
const response = await fetch(${API_BASE}${endpoint}.json.gz);
const buffer = Buffer.from(await response.arrayBuffer());
const decompressed = gunzipSync(buffer);
return JSON.parse(decompressed.toString('utf-8'));
}

Then replace:

await fetchData('cities')

with:

await fetchGzipJson('cities')

seed.txt

Source (optional)

No response

[dosubot]

Hi @SourabhBhanwala! I'm Dosu and I’m helping the countries-states-cities-database team.

The cities.json file was intentionally removed and replaced with a compressed cities.json.gz file to reduce repository size, so scripts expecting the uncompressed file now get a 404 error (source, another).

To fix your seeder, update it to fetch the .json.gz file, decompress it using Node.js's zlib module, and parse the result as JSON. Here’s a minimal example:

import { gunzipSync } from 'zlib';

async function fetchGzipJson(endpoint) {
  const response = await fetch(`${API_BASE}${endpoint}.json.gz`);
  const buffer = Buffer.from(await response.arrayBuffer());
  const decompressed = gunzipSync(buffer);
  return JSON.parse(decompressed.toString('utf-8'));
}

// Usage:
const cities = await fetchGzipJson('cities');

There are no plans to restore the uncompressed cities.json file, so this change is permanent. If you prefer, you can also manually decompress cities.json.gz using tools like gunzip or 7-Zip before loading it (details). No other references to cities.json remain in the repo; only external scripts need updating.

To reply, just mention @dosu.

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