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Pocketbase: Open-source back end in one file
- miguelgargallo 3y agoPocketBase is amazing, I can achieve almost all my projects self hosted without any thirdparty on dockers with this https://github.com/miguelgargallo/docker-pocketbase https://github.com/miguelgargallo/docker-pocketbase
- BilalBudhani 3y agoI have been following PocketBase since its early day - what I absolutely love about this project is how it actively tries to avoid complexity and focuses on simple yet minimalist approach. Moreover, the ease of deployment by simply uploading a single binary on the server makes it even more attractive. After they introduced Javascript support in the backend - I feel it became a serious contender to challenge Remix, Next.js etc. frameworks. Looking forward to v1
- d1sxeyes 3y agoI use PocketBase for mostly everything where I need a back end now. I came across a situation where I needed to write a custom SQL join (technically I could have just fetched all the data and done it in Node, I suppose). I was shocked at how easy it was to write the query even inserting URL parameters and selecting based on the authenticated user only. Fully recommend for basically everything. Great app. Not sure it would replace Next or Remix, but definitely add to the stack to simplify.
- BilalBudhani 3y agoInteresting! I haven't made anything serious yet with the PocketBase (mostly due to lack of time & not anything to do with PB). I'm curious to know what kind of projects did you build using PB and how was your development experience?
- d1sxeyes 3y agoBits and pieces. A bedtime tracking app for my kid, a microblog, a TikTok clone, a budget app, a text-to-speech app with translation functionality… Development experience was outstanding. I primarily use SvelteKit and integrate PocketBase for SSR, so I use the SDK almost exclusively and it’s fantastic. Everything just works exactly the way you would expect. I can’t imagine anything easier to implement, and as yet, I haven’t found any major gaps in what I can do with it, normally with OOB functionality. Development velocity is very high and the developer is super responsive on GitHub. The documentation is very good and kept up to date pretty well. My only real concern is that the project has a pretty poor bus factor, otherwise, I’m very impressed.
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoOne of my production projects with around 20,000 customers and 400k arr runs on Pocketbase with zero issues. I cannot recommend it enough.
- literallyroy 3y agoIs vertical scaling enough/do you have any concerns for the future?
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoVertical scaling will be enough till I sell that business.
- harha_ 3y agoit actively tries to avoid complexity Sounds refreshing.
- oschvr 3y agoReally cool, I'll give it a try
- sonovice 3y agoHave been using pocketbase in production for a mobile app for a couple of month now and so far it was a _very_ pleasent experience. Together with the JS SDK it is now my go to backend framework for everything where I don't need specialized libraries (like ML stuff etc.)
- thangngoc89 3y agoI've been using Pocketbase for several projects. While it's a delightful experience for solo-dev to quickly finish a project from backend to complicated frontend, I wish it has bulk-insert out of the box.
- brabel 3y agoIt seems to me that redbean is a much simpler, vastly lighter one-file web server + sqlite DB: https://redbean.dev/ https://redbean.dev/ As a bonus, the same file runs on basically any OS without any dependencies on the local system, not even libc.
- lars_francke 3y agoTo me it seems as if both tools serve a pretty different purpose. Redbean doesn't have authentication or the client SDKs at least.
- brabel 3y agoThe self-described purpose is "opensource backend in one file". They both offer that.
- toastercat 3y agoI love redbean, just holding out for ARM support.
- jart 3y agoIt's here! Download the nightly build, which is a fat binary for x86+arm: wget https://cosmo.zip/pub/cosmos/bin/redbean chmod +x redbean ./redbean Enjoy! I'll get a release out on redbean.dev soon.
- toastercat 3y agoBest late X-Mas present ever. :) Thank you.
- TeddyDD 3y agoIt's like saying nginx is better than superbase/firebase. Apples to oranges. You could replicate PocketBase in Readbean, but you would have to implement from scratch: - resources with CRUD API and real time subscriptions - admin UI - authz & authn system
- rolisz 3y agoI mostly know Python. Is there something similar in Python? Or the backend language is not relevant, because you mostly use this from JavaScript anyway?
- eternityforest 3y agoPackaging this as a Python lib that could run under WSGI/ASGI and use all the awesome python libs would be amazing. I wonder if that's possible?
- ajayvk 3y agoI have been building a project https://github.com/claceio/clace https://github.com/claceio/clace which aims to make building hypermedia based web applications easier. Clace is implemented in go, it uses Starlark (python syntax subset) for application configuration. With Clace, the apps are implemented using Starlark and (go) html templates, HTMX is used for web interface, app developer does not need to write any JavaScript.
- fortyseven 3y agohttps://github.com/vaphes/pocketbase https://github.com/vaphes/pocketbase
- 082349872349872 3y agoWhat minimal front-ends are there that one could combine with this minimal back-end to provide a minimal end-to-end?
- BilalBudhani 3y agoI would say - htmx (https://htmx.org/ https://htmx.org/) - Alpine.js (https://alpinejs.dev/ https://alpinejs.dev/) both are minimal and very easy to get started.
- flaviocopes 3y agoBeen enjoying using PocketBase with Astro + htmx + Alpine
- BilalBudhani 3y agonice! I'm curious to know why would you need Alpine or Htmx if you have one of them in your app? I thought they are mutually exclusive.
- flaviocopes 3y agohtmx = client-server networking Alpine = JS sprinkles Alpine is for example, I want to show/hide a menu on mobile. I want to upload files via drag and drop. I want to have a bin icon over an image when I hover with mouse to delete it. I want to double click an input field to edit it. I want to close an overlay when I click outside of it, or when I press “esc”. Also modals, although you can do them in htmx very nicely too, so that’s borderline. Anything that involves network, htmx. Things that are just frontend, Alpine suits better. _hyperscript is basically the Alpine equivalent. It's like the difference between Turbo and Stimulus in the Rails world
- BilalBudhani 3y agoGotcha! I'm gonna dig more into this stack. Thanks for breaking it down for me.
- account-5 3y agoDart SDK, excellent. Just what I'm looking for.
- WM6v 3y agoWhat are realistic bottlenecks to expect from a backend like this? Eg. a web app serving users that write posts simultaneously
- blackoil 3y agoMore than one server. Sqlite should be thread safe and simple services can scale to thousands of parallal users. If you are OK with some downtime every 6 months when server goes down it will scale well. Deploy/ rollback will be an effort.
- ozim 3y agoDownside with separate SQLite databases will be when you want to have statistics over many users.
- rudasn 3y agoI'm in this situation right now. How would one go about solving this? To keep this simple, I'm thinking exporting just the necessary data from each db and inserting that to a stats db (having a source column to each table, referring to the original db). Then load the stats db with Metabase or something. Migrations on the stats db may be a bit of a pain, as well as making sure that all data is exported and imported correctly every time. I'm sure there are better ideas.
- jocaal 3y agoLitestream is a library that allows you to easily create backups. You can probably just do analytics queries on the backup data. https://litestream.io/ https://litestream.io/
- djfobbz 3y agoSee this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26581807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26581807
- WM6v 3y ago
- eternityforest 3y agoLooks like what you hope LibreOffice Base will be, when one first years of the existence of those kinds of tools. Really nice, looks like something I'd love to work with someday!
- saasjosh 3y agoCool homepage but I don't even understand what this thing does.
- diggan 3y agoAre you a developer? Because it seems to be geared towards developers. It's something like a all-in-one backend that you can use as a starting point and extend if needed. Personally, I think the website is clear and concise. Doesn't even have any marketing filler which is a huge plus in my corner.
- addandsubtract 3y agoIt's like a smaller Supabase, which was an open source alternative of Firebase. So basically a database, authentication, file storage, and backend in one solution.
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoIt's substantially better than Supabase and much easier to host and deploy.
- mdnahas 3y agoIt is a simple program that (1) hosts a webserver, (2) runs server-side code, and (3) hosts a database. It also has built-in support for logging in and permissions to data. Thus, if you want to write a simple website that needs permissions, storage, and server-side code, it's a great backend solution. The limitation is that it isn't high performance.
- Ilasky 3y agoBeen using Pocketbase for almost all of my projects lately. Its realtime database is especially nice to introduce multiplayer functionality with relative ease. It plus SvelteKit has been a dream to get up and running using the JS SDK.
- overbytecode 3y agoI’m curious how you’re integrating it with Sveltekit? Are you using Sveltekit just as a static generator?
- Ilasky 3y agoDepends upon the project. For CRUD apps, sveltekits progressive enhancement and form actions make it quick to to add simple function to the page. You can store the pocketbase instance, pb, in locals and reference it all over the application. For more multiplayer things, sticking a client-side subscription to a collection allows updates of elements that can be worked with/added/moved around etc.
- doublerabbit 3y agoScouring the documentation there's mention of a way to use PocketBase without JavaScript or Dart. Are they the only methods?
- diggan 3y agoIt seems to be Golang based from what I can tell? And I'm guessing it either exposes a HTTP or WebSocket API, both which are usable from any language.
- skottenborg 3y agoThis is correct. It's golang and it exposes a plentiful API.
- eitland 3y agoTypeScript is support on the frontend for oldtimers like me who have used plain JS for far too long and refuse to accept the torture of unnecessarily untyped languages any longer. Also as already mentioned by others there exist web APIs.
- karencarits 3y agoIt is great to see the number of good opensource projects in this area. Grist and NocoDB deserve mentions, although more targeted towards database management. It is also amazing that they provide so simple ways to get started (single file/electron) - https://github.com/gristlabs https://github.com/gristlabs - https://nocodb.com/ https://nocodb.com/
- slig 3y agoDid not know about either of those, thanks. I've been using Baserow for small projects that I believe Pocketbase is a way better fit.
- jddj 3y agoI've been using Pocketbase in production for a few months now, with alpinejs on the front end. The development philosophy is on point. It's genuinely pleasant, pragmatic software which serves a real purpose and it improves weekly without feature creep. I watch the discussions and issues slowly getting more tiresome as it becomes more mainstream and worry that he'll burn out trying to keep up with the level of support he's offered until now. I would very strongly encourage anyone using this to generate income to support the project on open collective.
- jslakro 3y agoWhat other technologies in the stack you have?
- jddj 3y agoThere are two C# services which do some background bits and pieces. This logic could have been put within pocketbase as well, but the body of work they depend on was already .net. Other than that it's just little JavaScript callbacks in the back and typescript in the front. There isn't much missing that you truly need to bolt things on for, provided SQLite is appropriate for your usecase.
- bambax 3y agoFirst time I hear about this... looks absolutely fantastic! Will try.
- xsumirx 3y agoDidn't know tool like this existed. Thanks for sharing.
- rijavecb 3y agoPocketbase is amazing! So far I had a great experience using it as a backend/database for the app I'm building where I'm using React with Vite for the frontend. I'm using it mainly for auth and for keeping track of paid and free accounts. Some things that I found rather useful: - It's super easy to host. I was initially thinking of using Appwrite or Supabase but found it a tricky to self-host them, especially Supabase. I could spin up Appwrite quickly via CapRover, but found it an overkill for what I needed. - View collections [1] make it easy to return just a subset of the data that you need. In my case I'm using a view collection as a join for users and paid_users collections, where I just return their paid through date. - The fact that you can extend it with Go or JS [2] should make it possible to completely skip having a backend, at least if your needs aren't very complex. I definitely plan to continue using it for some smaller/side projects. Currently I'm thinking of trying to use it as CMS for an Astro blog and in the future as backend for some browser extensions. [1] - https://pocketbase.io/docs/collections/#view-collection https://pocketbase.io/docs/collections/#view-collection [2] - https://pocketbase.io/docs/use-as-framework/ https://pocketbase.io/docs/use-as-framework/
- Daynil 3y agoI feel like super easy to host needs to be re-emphasized. We're talking about dropping a single binary into your server and you're off to the races. If only more things were so simple.
- imnotreallynew 3y agoIsn’t that how any Go project is put online?
- paulgb 3y agoThe key distinction here seems to be that it uses an in-core database (SQLite), whereas a Go project may depend on an out-of-core database like Postgres, which would then also have to be deployed. For many projects (especially hobby projects where downtime is tolerable), the former is probably quite sufficient.
- 3y ago
- notyoutube 3y agoI've skimmed at the docs, and it's not clear to me how it would deal with: * Something like row-level access control, so that people can only access the data in tables that belong to them (say clients can only view their own purchases, and also not modify them after they checked them out). * Integration with the rest of the world, e.g. sending email, acting on triggers, etc. * Something like CSV export/import. * Internationalization. Would that all be possible? Straightforward? Do those all require extending (with go or js)? Looks like a nice tool.
- flaviocopes 3y agoCheck out API Rules https://pocketbase.io/docs/api-rules-and-filters/#api-rules https://pocketbase.io/docs/api-rules-and-filters/#api-rules Hooks https://pocketbase.io/docs/js-overview/ https://pocketbase.io/docs/js-overview/ Admin panel has backups for data, and import/export of collections schema
- jddj 3y agoThe first point (authn) is inherent to the unextended framework via filter rules. Most of the remainder requires extension other than authz emails, but extension at its simplest just means adding a plain old JavaScript function to run on a record lifecycle event of some kind - typically [before/after] [insert/update/delete] of <record>. Various GO APIs are exposed to the JavaScript runtime for doing filesystem, cryptography, http, email, etc work. For i18n you have templates and a database.
- mdnahas 3y agoI've been developing for PocketBase for 2 months. As someone else mentioned, API rules can control access to rows. It can send emails. Set timers. And send its own requests to other webservers. (I haven't used any of these features.) https://pocketbase.io/docs/js-sending-emails/ https://pocketbase.io/docs/js-sending-emails/ I had to write my own CSV importer. (I'm hoping to open-source it.) As for internationalization, what specific features did you want? That seems more like a front-end feature.
- notyoutube 3y ago
- TruthWillHurt 3y agoVery cool, but this is a security anti-pattern. Having the auth, db and file server in the same service.. an attacker doesn't even need lateral traversal or privilege escalation once inside..
- deberon 3y agoThere’s something to be said about drastically reducing your threat surface too. Locking down 1 server is easier than locking down a fleet. You can still have security in depth inside your server.
- punnerud 3y agoSeems like a JavaScript based version similar to Django (Python)?
- robjan 3y agoIt's more a self-hosted alternative to Firebase written in golang
- twsted 3y agoPocketbase seems really well done and useful. I am building something similar but at a lower level and based on PostgreSQL. https://github.com/sted/smoothdb https://github.com/sted/smoothdb It aims to be compatible with the PostgREST API.
- igtztorrero 3y agoGood Golang anda Svelte code organization, I Will take as example
- remram 3y agoI am a bit confused, is it the backend's backend? E.g. something that is used by the HTTP server app, like a DBMS would be? Or is it actually the backend, e.g. the frontend (browser) talks to it directly?
- kisamoto 3y agoIt can be the backend itself if you just need auth (both authentication and authorization) and your SQL tables to be a REST API. This often suits frontend single page applications in JS/TS and Pocketbase also provides a JS SDK to ease this (with realtime updates). It's a similar model to Firebase but without the lock-in. However if you want to write more logic you can also import Pocketbase as a library and extend it with hooks, custom endpoints etc. all written in Go. Edit: Added more info about using Pocketbase with a JS SPA frontend.
- szundi 3y agoEvery tech/stack is a lock-in, you just pay with different currencies and get different challanges at different stages
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoYou would use it instead of things like Supabase and Appwrite. It gives you a server, a db and easy authentication, authorization with real-time queries like firebase.
- chazeon 3y agoI feel like this will be super interesting when pairing with static site generator such as eleventy. Using static site generator is sometimes difficult because of lacking a web backend and ghost is too heavy for me.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y agoCould you explain a bit more this setup? I have been looking for a way to have a tool to fill pages for a static site generator that's local and then just git push in a simplified way. The idea is to create a website for my mother, without having to deal with hosting at all (static github pages). Does this combination work that way?
- mdnahas 3y agoNo. PocketBase runs on a server. It needs a host. It is simple, so its single program is (1) a webserver, (2) runs server-side code, and (3) hosts a DB. I'm running a $12-per-month server on Vultr and its only service is PocketBase. You don't need to host the webpages on PocketBase. If you wanted all your webpages to be on Github Pages, you could do that.
- chazeon 3y agoYou won’t need to really run server all the time, you can run locally and use it as a lightweight CMS, and run only when you need to edit and generating anything. You can choose to only upload the generated HTML files to GitHub. See my explanation on my reply to the original post.
- chazeon 3y agoYes. Some static site generators have good support for generating pages from a dynamic source, say API, database or anything you can access using programming language. See eleventy, for instance, has the “Javascript data files” [1], it run some JS code to generate a list of posts, here we can fetch from pocketbase, then, we can generate pages dynamically [2]. Pocketbase in this case just act as a lightweight CMS. Is this what you’re talking about? [1]: https://www.11ty.dev/docs/data-js/ https://www.11ty.dev/docs/data-js/ [2]: https://www.11ty.dev/docs/pages-from-data/ https://www.11ty.dev/docs/pages-from-data/
- fullstackchris 3y agoVery cool. Reminds me of the encore framework, also written in go: https://github.com/encoredev/encore https://github.com/encoredev/encore Need to spend some more time looking into these go based frameworks, they seem great for quick prototyping
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoNope encore is horrible to use in comparison. Pocketbase is levels above encore and similar projects.
- zffr 3y agoWhat are the pros/cons of this over firebase?
- victorbjorklund 3y agoPro: - It will be cheaper when scale - You have full control of the data since selfhosted - Easier to extend with custom code Cons: - you need to take care of all the hosting, backups, etc - cant scale to infinity like firebase (but on the other hand when you reach that scale youe firebase bill will be huge anyway)
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoOut of all the PaaS I tried including Supabase and Appwrite, Pocketbase is the best. Great performance, intuitive features, actually self hosted and a joy to deploy.
- melicerte 3y agoI was looking for a frontend I could use out of the box on top of a sqlite database to design and store my wine collection (since I removed Vivino and its 800+ "partners" it shares my data with). Looks like a single executable, the admin interface and the database I can store on my laptop (and add it to my backup) is all I was looking for. Thank you for PocketBase and thank you for sharing it. That's why I always come back to HN :-)
- air7 3y agothis is great. What would be the frontend equivalent? A simple, no bells and whistles frontend to throw something together quickly?
- jadayesnaamsi 3y agoIt is the first time I see that "hook" pattern in a Go API backend: `hook.Hook` and `hook.TaggedHook`. Where does it come from? Why is it useful here? What are the alternatives? Advantages/Drawbacks? Is there an article somewhere, outside of the Pocketbase docs, presenting that pattern? - https://github.com/pocketbase/pocketbase/blob/master/core/app.go https://github.com/pocketbase/pocketbase/blob/master/core/ap... - https://github.com/pocketbase/pocketbase/tree/master/tools/hook https://github.com/pocketbase/pocketbase/tree/master/tools/h...
- aziis98 3y agoThis just looks like the "Event Bus" [1] [2] [3] pattern, this is not the one from the React world if you were thinking about that. Hooks here are just the following, the "Hook" is just a collection of event handlers. type Handler[T any] func(e T) error type handlerPair[T any] struct { id string handler Handler[T] } type Hook[T any] struct { mux sync.RWMutex handlers []*handlerPair[T] } It's very useful when you want to make an easily extensible library/framework/application, as you can see in pocketbase/core/app.go you can register handlers for various things that can happen. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event-driven_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event-driven_programming [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish%E2%80%93subscribe_pattern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish%E2%80%93subscribe_patt... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_pattern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_pattern
- tamimio 3y agoI like this for testing and quick/simple database, very useful in concept for building a platform for embedded work, where you don’t need to go down the rabbit hole in the whole full stack tech.
- rbosinger 3y agoI've been using Pocketbase for personal projects on the machine I use to self-host services. It's great. You get CRUD and real-time stuff for free and I didn't really have to spend much time learning to start working with it and having it running in an LXC.
- turtlebits 3y agoI like the idea, but after using it, the query apis aren't expressive enough. I wish I could write SQL instead of making 2+ api calls to get the data I want.
- ako 3y agoDid you try view collections, https://pocketbase.io/docs/collections/#view-collection https://pocketbase.io/docs/collections/#view-collection ?
- dhc02 3y agoI'm no expert, but it seems like raw SQL is supported. From the docs: "It also exposes app.Dao().DB() builder that allows executing various SQL statements (including raw queries)."
- mdnahas 3y agoYes, that's correct. In server-side code, you can write SQL queries. JavaScript API: https://pocketbase.io/docs/js-database/ https://pocketbase.io/docs/js-database/ Go API: https://pocketbase.io/docs/go-database/ https://pocketbase.io/docs/go-database/
- tiffanyh 3y agoSo it's the "Supabase of SQLite"? Aren't there entire classes of problems that shouldn't exist for SQLite because it's intended to be an embedded database, as opposed to a client/server architecture like Postgres/Supabase? And as such, I'm confused why this exists.
- mdnahas 3y agoPocketBase is trying to be a simple webserver, code-running backend, and database. I believe the author chose SQLite because it is simple. PocketBase isn't trying to have every feature nor be high performance.
- tiffanyh 3y agoLike Althttpd? That’s the web server created by the SQLite team and also serves sqlite.org https://sqlite.org/althttpd/doc/trunk/althttpd.md https://sqlite.org/althttpd/doc/trunk/althttpd.md
- ihateolives 3y agoThanks for bringing it to my attention, never heard of it before. Have you used it?
- LVB 3y ago>And as such, I'm confused why this exists. Beyond the standalone server mode, I'm able to literally import this as a library/framework right into my Go app (https://pocketbase.io/docs/go-overview/ https://pocketbase.io/docs/go-overview/). Having a single binary that contains my custom business logic + a very nice DB/Auth/Admin/... is a very compelling option.
- stevage 3y agoIt's very common to use SQLite within backends, whenever concurrency is not a big issue.
- imperialdrive 3y agoThis looks too good to be true for a project I had in mind—kudos!
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y agoI'm not sure I understand what exactly is. I like the tips, but I don't understand: is it an app that I can run on my local machine?
- simonw 3y agoIt's a binary called "pocketbase" that you can download and run on your machine. When you run it, it starts a localhost web server. That server includes a web based UI tool that lets you create "collections" (effectively database tables) and insert/update/delete data in them. More importantly, it provides a JSON API (and a client library) for interacting with those collections.
- puchatek 3y agoBut people build apps on top of it and deploy it to the cloud, too, right? Does it then compete with stuff like AWS RDS?
- simonw 3y agoI think it's more like a self-hosted Firebase - you run it on a server (with a disk drive that can persist the data) to get a hosted API for your apps to talk to.
- vunderba 3y agoHmm... kind of. It's pretty substantially different from Firebase which is defacto NoSQL versus Pocketbase which uses SQL. Given that it's based on SQLite I'd be very interested to know how well this would work as a true backend for a multiuser site that allows users to interact/post/etc.
- stevage 3y agoIf you have ever built a web app backend that consists of a database, a REST API for that database, and a web admin interface to the database - well, this gives you all of that for free, just by running an executable.
- wg0 3y agoAfter ent.io entity framework, that's the other most beautiful piece of software that I have seen in Go! The simplicity is simply mind boggling! Going to give it a try!
- teknico 3y agoIts URL is presumably https://entgo.io/ https://entgo.io/ .
- efields 3y agoThe demo is kind of incredible. It’s the admin ux of an app we built internally over 2ish years. It’s just… right there :)
- tommica 3y agoHow are database migrations handled in this? Ive never understood how BaaSes are to be used when I need to add a new column to my table and do some inserts into it in the same migration
- jacobdejean 3y agoA lot of these tools just abstract away migrations. But I do know some like Supabase let you clone a copy locally and manually perform migrations if you see fit
- mdnahas 3y agoPocketBase has a pb_migrations/ directory. If you throw a file of a certain format, PocketBase will automatically loaded it and update the DB.
- tommica 3y agoOh neat, that would absolutely do the job. Just git push and let the gitops do the rest!
- jarekceborski 3y agoSimple is beautiful! I think it could be more than enough for 90% or more use cases, and without over-engineering.
- mdnahas 3y agoI've been developing on PocketBase for 2 months. The system goes into production in 1 to 2 months. I'm exceptionally happy with it. I'm developing an webapp for a friend's company and wanted a very simple system to hand-off. The whole thing is running with one binary: Pocketbase. It runs a webserver, server-side Javascript (compiled TypeScript) code, and SQLite database. The single process is hosted on Vultr for $12 per month. My frontend is written in SvelteKit (static adapter) + Svelte + TypeScript. Pocketbase is well done. The author has been exceptionally responsive to my questions. He is fast and clear. I have had a few minor issues: The documentation has bare spots (but is very good for most things). I had to write my own CSV loader. (I hope to open-source it.) Writing lots of objects through the CRUD interface is slow. (It's possible to write faster using server-side code.) Unit testing for the server-side JavaScript had to be shoehorned in. And I wish Copilot/ChatGPT could answer questions better. But these issues have been minor, given all my work on the project. It has some quirks. There's no way to set the 404 page on the webserver. And the binary's location in the filesystem matters. It was designed for the author's use and you have to live with these choices. As I said, I've been happy using it. It fit my needs exactly: simple and I could code everything in one language, TypeScript. Pocketbase is not high-performance, but I didn't need that. I've had a few ideas for side projects and, when I'm done this work, I'll implement one on Pocketbase because it is that easy. And, as part of my contract, my friend's company will donate to Pocketbase. :)
- __e 3y ago> And, as part of my contract, my friend's company will donate to Pocketbase. :) What a positive way to give back! Kudos!
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y agoHow much can the "crud operations page" can be customized?
- Humphrey 3y agoIt looks really cool! I can imagine using this for small projects. I wonder if it would be possible to also support a GraphQL API in the future?
- mrwyndham 3y agoIf anyone is interested in extending I have done some work on it and can confirm it is quite easy. I extended it to be able to use stripe check it out below: https://github.com/mrwyndham/pocketbase-stripe https://github.com/mrwyndham/pocketbase-stripe
- masterwyndham 3y ago[flagged]
- fayazara 3y agoPocketbase is amazing, I had made a small starter with nuxt 3. https://github.com/fayazara/pocketbase-nuxt https://github.com/fayazara/pocketbase-nuxt Example has 1. Auth 2. Route rules 3. CRUD actions 4. Realtime events 5. Storage Needs refactoring but I really enjoyed working with it, I want to add stripe subscriptions to this taking routes rules to it's limits, not sure how yet, will figure it out.
- mihalycsaba 3y agoCan this thing be used for a forum type site + a minimal game feature with around 5k daily users? How could you scale this with a single common database?
- cweagans 3y ago5k daily users is basically nothing. Pocketbase would probably work well for you.
- RamblingCTO 3y agoSo it's just auth + files on top of a db, essentially providing auth'd CRUD with extras? So you write the business logic in the frontend?