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Pocketbase – open-source realtime back end in 1 file
- mickael-kerjean 11mo agoIs this some sort of supabase but with sqlite and without the operational complexity?
- odie5533 11mo agoYes that is what it is.
- sjdonado 11mo agoThis is an amazing project, can't wait to see the 1.0
- ranger_danger 11mo agoApparently 1 file just means a static go binary with a bunch of separate assets compiled in. I guess for some reason I was hoping for source code that was only one file.
- florians 11mo agoSame
- dustbunny 11mo agoLike a single header c lib from some eastern European S tier programmer.
- ftchd 11mo agotsoding mentioned
- phplovesong 11mo agoI really loved his ocaml days. Learnt alot. He does only C these days, but his streams are fun to watch nontheless.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- wowamit 11mo agoSame here. At first, I thought it was a one-file-based database, which would have been even more commendable.
- SpaceNoodled 11mo agoThat should have been possible, since it's based on SQLite.
- EvanAnderson 11mo agoIt got some good discussion back in January, 2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38898934 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38898934 There have been a ton of releases since then. It looked like a pretty interesting project at the time. It made me want to look for a project to use it for but I never got around to it. I'd be interested to hear from people who have been using it and how keeping up with the releases has been (compatibility / breaking changes in API, ease of migration, issues, etc).
- impure 11mo agoI've been using it for a while. There was only one release that required manual migrations. I think 0.23.0 and apparently the dev is backporting security updates for those who haven't upgraded. I use Go so all I have to do is `go get -u` and `go mod tidy` and then it's upgraded. It works great.
- input_sh 11mo agoBeen using it for about a year now, but not in a way it's "intended to be". I wrote some scripts that add data to it and then I have a (static) website that pulls data from it and builds pages. So, for me it's more of a REST API and a web interface in front of sqlite than a proper auth provider (at least for now). My biggest gripe with it by far is that the web interface is not phone-optimised at all, which prevents me from quickly correcting a field or two when I'm not behind a computer. For my use case, that happens at least once a week. Another gripe I have is that the search bar in the admin interface could be far more powerful than it currently is. Anything more complex than searching my records by exactly one field and I'm better off writing one-off scripts to do so than by using the web interface. Good things: the control it gives me over which fields get exposed publicly, ability to resize images (instead of slowing down my build by doing so from the frontend), overall stability (never had it go down unexpectedly), S3-compatible storage, automated backups. To give some sense of scale, ~10k records scattered across 30 or so tables (or collections as they call it), most with some attachments, and plenty of one-to-one and one-to-many relations between the tables. The database itself is only a couple of megabytes in size, but the whole backup (attachments included) is nearing 3 gigabytes now. While updates happen pretty frequently, they don't change the parts I actually use, so I can't say I ever struggled with keeping up to date.
- wowamit 11mo ago> PocketBase is an open source backend consisting of embedded database (SQLite) with realtime subscriptions I am not sure I understand—is this a wrapper around SQLite?
- rubenvanwyk 11mo agoTrailbase is the same concept, but written in Rust instead of Go.
- odie5533 11mo agoTrailBase has a comparison page https://trailbase.io/comparison/pocketbase/ https://trailbase.io/comparison/pocketbase/
- rudedogg 11mo agoI appreciate their honesty. After a quick look I’d give another point to Pocketbase for it’s admin UI. The TrailBase one is pretty sloppy (on mobile at least), and looks like it’s using bootstrap. Pocketbase has a sense of quality/care around it that seems missing.
- input_sh 11mo agoPocketbase's admin UI is not optimised for phones at all.
- trailbase 11mo agoYou won't get any argument here. PocketBase's is very polished and friendly. I fell back onto a popular pre-existing UI component system called shadcn (which does look a bit like bootstrap), not only because you gotta start somewhere but also because I'm not the caliber of UX designer Gani is :bow:. If you have the time, I would appreciate any feedback on how to improve. I'm a bit surprised on the mobile comment, since last I checked PB's UI wasn't responsive, i.e. you had to scroll a lot horizontally on mobile. Despite it's missing polish, I tried to make TB's at least work well on mobile. Could you elaborate? - thanks
- rudedogg 11mo ago> Could you elaborate? - thanks The part that prompted my comment was clicking to edit a row on mobile in vertical orientation. Rather than fill the screen the edit shows up in a modal which doesn't really make sense, since you have so little horizontal space to work with. And the inputs are cut off slightly due to no padding. And the whole admin UI overfills my (pro max) iPhone when held vertically, I think due to the navbar icons? Anyway, it'd be nice to not have to horizontally scroll to see those 40px or w/e everywhere. It makes it so you have to horizontally scroll to see or evaluate every page One other little nice thing you could do if you wanted is prefill the username/password with the demo user. --- Very cool project, and it's cool to see how Rust benefits the performance.
- zipping1549 11mo agoBeen following this for some time now and it's a real delight to use. SSE subscription is really nice.
- ftchd 11mo agousing it on mobile too https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pocketbase-mobile-pok/id6748284127 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pocketbase-mobile-pok/id674828...
- rjh29 11mo agoWow you charge a subscription for this? The Apple ecosystem is wild.
- aitchnyu 11mo agoWhats the method to maintain a git repo of JS and unit tests? I remember a team with Firebase copy pasting code from dev to prod and between "modules" within an env and making a ton of mistakes.
- ffsm8 11mo agoIs this really realtime? From looking at the description it sounds more like subscriptions to events of data changes that are dispatched close to the data operation How would realtime even work for a networked system going over tcp? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_computing
- zwnow 11mo agoRealtime in tech is considered in timespans with short delays allowed, last time i have read about it it was like 100ms.
- fragmede 11mo agoRealtime in tech has a specific definition. The Wikipedia article covers it in more detail, but think about things like airplane wing control or space rocket computers needing to do things exactly when asked, or else people die.
- zwnow 11mo agoEven that stuff has a delay.
- anonymousiam 11mo agoFYI, my above referenced RTOS was for a space-based application.
- anonymousiam 11mo agoHeh. I wasn't aware that there was a new definition of realtime. My 40+ year career consisted of about 20% realtime embedded firmware development. In all of my experience, 100ms is an absurdly long delay. Most RTOSs (that call themselves such) have latency measured in μs. The last serious RTOS that I wrote (MSP430, non-preemptive) had a firm requirement that any task must complete within 1ms. That one ran on a single threaded MCU clocked at 25MHz. It had a unix-like scheduler, with prioritized tasks, and I even threw in a 'top' display that showed per-task MCU usage, and load average.
- m00dy 11mo agoI can vibe code this in rust in a day most
- razemio 11mo agoNo, simple answer. Try it, link to the repo and I will tell you all the placed it failed. Vibe coding has its places. For something like pocketbase it most definitely is not ready yet.
- m00dy 11mo agolol
- steve_adams_86 11mo agoThis project is so well thought out, you couldn't vibe code it in a week or a month. Genuinely, it's quite a wonderfully designed piece of software. It seems simple at a glance, but what makes it so good is almost intangible; it's a joy to use not only because of what it is, but what it isn't as well. And I really believe that's not something you can achieve with vibes in such short order. Kind of like people said they could write airbnb or dropbox's software in a weekend. Sure, you can approximate it, but there's a bit of soul and momentum and history there that makes it more than a repository of code and gives it a unique capacity and potential all its own.
- a96 11mo agoNeat. You should do a video of that and comparing the results.
- postbase 11mo agoCongrats on the launch!
- socks 11mo agoeh? what launch? been using it for years now, it's brilliant
- wowamit 11mo agoI am curious to better understand the benchmarks against simple SQLite, especially under typical load. Any level of latency will be an unnecessary overhead.
- victorbjorklund 11mo agoHow do you use simple SQLite without any code in a webapp where the database is on the server?
- wowamit 11mo agoYou can't. I am curious if this adds another layer of latency.
- trailbase 11mo agoCan easily go either way. If you're comparing in-process SQLite to talking to SQLite over HTTP you'll probably get a small penalty for any language. When co-located on the same machine, you can probably expect something like ~5ms for JS (just for the event-loop to do the IO and getting back to you). However, if you have multiple processes reading and writing from the same DB it may actually aid latency due to congestion. I ran some benchmarks (TrailBase author here and big fan of PocketBase): https://trailbase.io/reference/benchmarks#insertion-benchmarks https://trailbase.io/reference/benchmarks#insertion-benchmar..., where you can see, e.g. the single-process drizzle (i.e. JS with in-process SQLite) performance vs over-HTTP for TrailBase. PocketBase should be similar when not fully loaded. There's also some concrete latency percentile numbers when at full-tilt: https://trailbase.io/reference/benchmarks#read-and-write-latency https://trailbase.io/reference/benchmarks#read-and-write-lat.... On my machine you can expect p50 to be around 15-20ms.
- JodieBenitez 11mo agoDatabase, admin, auth... is this some kind of Go's Django ?
- cess11 11mo agoIt's a platform similar to Supabase, Firebase and the like. I guess Heroku is also a somewhat reasonable comparison.
- Humphrey 11mo agoI've been trying out Pocketbase on a side project idea. I'm super impressed! Having worked for many years on Django projects, Pocketbase seems like a perfect fit for those small to medium sized projects for which you don't want to create and maintain a traditional backend for. Happy to answer any questions.
- JodieBenitez 11mo agoDjango has great GIS integration. How does Pocketbase compare here ? Also, can Pocketbase work with PostgreSQL or is it SQLite only ?
- Humphrey 11mo agoSQLite only. I haven't come across any GIS integration. I think you should choose Pocketbase when it "not having features" and being lightweight is the feature you need.
- zeckalpha 11mo agoLike Postgres has PostGIS, SQLite has Spatialite. https://www.gaia-gis.it/fossil/libspatialite/index https://www.gaia-gis.it/fossil/libspatialite/index Unsure about integrating it with Pocketbase but I imagine it is reasonable to do.
- jdthedisciple 11mo agoHow easily can I migrate from an existing sqlite-based backend?
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- Humphrey 11mo agoI haven't tried this... but Pocketbase is opinionated in how it's schema is structured - and it needs to be the tool managing your schema. Therefore if it was me, I would use the Admin UI to create a new db with a similar data structure, and then use a third-party tool to select data and insert into the new database.
- olalonde 11mo agoFor those unfamiliar: this is a backend server you can configure via a GUI, so you can get a working backend with little or no code. It’s great for quick prototypes, MVPs, and simple apps. The concept was popularized by Firebase.
- dotancohen 11mo agoWhat does it actually do? Yes, I know what a backend is - and the backends I write have hundreds to thousands of lines of code that do very specific things. How can that be eliminated? What types of applications can be built with these tools?
- input_sh 11mo agoIt's meant to be a Firebase / Supabase alternative. Yes, you can always build a better backend yourself if you know what you're doing, or you can go from zero to having a proper auth (username/password, 0auth providers, one-time emails, multi-factor) to plug into by running a binary. Unlike Firebase, you can run it anywhere. Unlike Supabase, you don't need 10+ containers to do so.
- olalonde 11mo agoIt does the same things a typical CRUD backend does (REST/realtime API, authentication, authorization, validation, etc.). For example, you could use it when building a simple todo mobile app that syncs your data in the cloud. The catch is that the moment your requirements fall outside what the system supports, you are more or less f*cked.
- d1sxeyes 11mo agoWhile that may be true, it is worth seriously checking the docs and working out what requirements you have or might have. Pocketbase does an awesome job of providing extensibility, likely most of the stuff you want that’s not fully out of the box can be added in 20 lines of code or so.
- 11mo ago
- jharohit 11mo agolove it. been using for personal projects. some things that still need to be done before v1 launch: - easy data migration in and out (right now is a pain if its large volume of data from other DB eg firebase or sqlite!) - API/programmatic setup of tables (right now its only via UI making it hard to setup large complex tables with variable permissions) - Multi-instance: easiest is to have another pocketbase in "mirror" mode that it updates once a day or whatever with primary (primary > secondary method like in mongo is a great mechanism, with some kind of voting for primary)
- cweagans 11mo agoThere was somebody who was using one of the various sqlite replication tools to do multi-instance pocketbase. I can't remember if it was LiteFS or dqlite or something else, but I remember it scaling pretty well. The majority of applications aren't going to outgrow single-instance sqlite though. Also, you can do programmatic setup of tables with migrations: https://pocketbase.io/docs/go-migrations/ https://pocketbase.io/docs/go-migrations/ (also available in JS). I can't remember if pocketbase will automatically write migrations to disk for you or if there's a flag you need to turn on, but you can generate those migrations on a local instance, commit them to VCS, deploy them somewhere, and either run a command to run the migrations or turn on auto-migrate (which does what you'd expect).
- rubenbe 11mo agoI've built OpenSOHO using this, and it has been an amazing timesaver! Even though I modified it a bit to reuse the backend. It's clearly not what it's made for, but it wasn't too hard either. If you have a look at the screenshot, you'll recognize the Pocketbase pedigree immediately. https://github.com/rubenbe/opensoho/ https://github.com/rubenbe/opensoho/
- noodletheworld 11mo agoHmmm… firebase clones are many and varied. Whats special about this one? Being a single file binary doesnt impress me; thats true of many projects in many langauges. It seems nice you can use it as a go framework if you happen to use go, but Im not really compelled by the “it doesn't scale at all” aspects of it. Someone whos used some other similar stuff comment on why this over any of the others, eg. self hosted superbase?
- gjvc 11mo agoHmmm… firebase clones are many and varied. Can you recommend any in particular, were I wanting to migrate a project from firebase?
- trailbase 11mo agoThe most well-known ones are probably: Supabase, AppWrite and PocketBase.
- trailbase 11mo agoSelf-hosted Supabase is pretty good. I don't think anyone argues with that. It didn't used to be as smooth and it's certainly hungrier with many more moving parts. Could you elaborate a bit more on your scaling concerns? You can certainly have lock-congestion with SQLite. That, said Postgres - while awesome - isn't the most horizontally scalable beast.
- input_sh 11mo agoHave you ever seriously looked into self-hosting Supabase? One binary to manage one sqlite file is indeed quite a selling point in comparison to this: https://github.com/supabase/supabase/blob/master/docker/docker-compose.yml https://github.com/supabase/supabase/blob/master/docker/dock... Not saying Supabase is bad at all at what it does and I am very glad that it exists as an open source project, but they don't target the same type of project complexity at all.
- matt_callmann 11mo agoI'll give it a try, but I'm not a fan of the SPA approach. Try using it with Templ and server-side rendering (SSR) instead of any JavaScript framework. If anyone has already done this and can share their experience, I would love to hear about it!
- jddj 11mo agoI can speak to this. It works, though if you need auth/authz you'll probably want to add some middleware to get a cookie flow working instead of the jwt approach PB uses by default. If I remember right, essentially you set the cookie on login and on auth refresh and pull it out and into the auth header on all incoming requests.
- aleda145 11mo agoPocketbase is awesome. I'm using it as the auth layer for my side project (https://kavla.dev/ https://kavla.dev/). The hooks are great, even relatively complex things like spinning up infrastructure is easy (https://pocketbase.io/docs/go-event-hooks/ https://pocketbase.io/docs/go-event-hooks/)
- postbase 11mo agoPostbase uses PostgreSQL and BetterAuth. No GUI yet, but it's in the plan and will be called Admin (Panel). I had the same instinct of using SQLite, but then, after a bit of research, PostgreSQL seemed a better alternative for serious projects.
- andsoitis 11mo agoPostbase, in contrast to PocketBase, doesn’t seem ready for primetime : ” Brand new project launched 02 Nov 2025, this is boiler plate but working! Expect heavy changes coming every few hours until stable Mostly all code is ChatGPT generated but manually tested by human.”
- SwiftyBug 11mo agoAnd by that description, I assume it's never going to be ready for primetime.
- postbase 11mo agoI made it for my own needs without knowing pocketbase existed and it solved my problems and thats all that matters. Now I'm glad I didn't find out pkcketbase earlier otherwise I'd never have made Postbase. Regarding if it will ever be ready for prime time, time will tell.
- postbase 11mo agoSo does Pocketbase "Warning Please keep in mind that PocketBase is still under active development and therefore full backward compatibility is not guaranteed before reaching v1.0.0."
- odie5533 11mo agoLooks very cool! Good luck!
- postbase 11mo agoThank you
- yungeeker 11mo agoThis is 100% sick. Have been use this for one year.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- jddj 11mo agoWe use pocketbase for a lot of our internal LoB apps and it's been bulletproof. Saved us a lot of time and money. I'm a control freak and I like well defined endpoints with well defined performance characteristics, so the expressiveness of the API is in my mind a drawback for anything public facing, but it's undeniably a great experience on the front end, and if you design your tables with the API and filters in mind you can get to a good place. Overposting is another thing to be aware of when the db is so ergonomically shaped to the front end
- rjh29 11mo ago> Please keep in mind that PocketBase is still under active development and full backward compatibility is not guaranteed before reaching v1.0.0. PocketBase is NOT recommended for production critical applications yet, unless you are fine with reading the changelog and applying some manual migration steps from time to time.
- thisgoodlife 11mo agoEven for battle-tested software like Postgresql, always read the changelog and test it thoroughly before upgrading.
- krzyk 11mo agoI would love something similar but for frontend. I like developing backends, but writing JavaScript is to tiring.
- andsoitis 11mo agoWhat facilities would an equivalent frontend solutuon have in your mind?
- throwaway77385 11mo agoThere are so, so many frameworks that it can be overwhelming to find a good fit, but give htmx or svelte a try, they often come up as great ways to simplify JS. I'd steer clear of NextJS. Maybe even React, as they have become convoluted messes over time that rarely offer much benefit, unless you are on a big team and working on a huge, complex code base. Though job prospects are better for those frameworks. If you use AI in your workflow, however, due to the huge amount of public knowledge available, React and NextJS can become easier to work with. Be wary of the sometimes extreme breaking changes introduced quite suddenly however.
- foul 11mo agoIn the last years a market for "no code" software has sprawled, just etch the interface on a tables SPA, plug Okta, plug your backend or Firebase to their apis and you should be set. You can also find dozens of drag n drop builders and block editors working for modern frontend dev, there are a lot for React for example, just vibe code the components.
- olav 11mo agoI love it and use it for personal projects and internal tools. I tend to combine it with https://pocketpages.dev/ https://pocketpages.dev/ which gives me file-based routing and nice templates. Ah, and Pocketbase has automatic database migrations, so all schema modifications can go into version control. I even hacked a Gemini protocol server into it, so that I can browse my personal knowledge graph using Lagrange.
- phl 11mo agoWhat is Lagrange? I couldn’t find any project in the context of LLM or knowledge graph.
- andsoitis 11mo agoThere is a minimalist browser named Lagrange built for the Gemini protocol (a lightweight alternative to HTTP). I’m guessing that’s what they refer to.
- foul 11mo agoThey said they hacked a Gemini server, Lagrange is a Geminispace browser. https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange
- throwaway290 11mo agoit's funny because no one brought up LLM including the link posted but you go "...it must be LLM related" :)
- 9dev 11mo agoI'd love to read the docs, but I'm still busy playing with the googly-eye-gopher on the landing page. Super cute idea.
- throwaway77385 11mo agoI see Pocketbase, I upvote. Using it in a few production apps and it's been a very solid experience. Some breaking changes from time to time, but generally very solid. Also has a lot of extensibility built in. Sometimes you might hit a scenario where it doesn't provide what you need, which is when things can get a bit hairy, but nothing a skilled dev can't work around.
- BrandoElFollito 11mo agoThis was my exact comment, thanks. It is a very good piece of work, and extensible with JS (I just tried that). I have a fear about the future because the dev is alone, and responds alone in the discussions. He is also quite, how to say, "rough" in the interactions, which I can completely understand, being the one pulled around by everyone. This is a very, very good piece of work when you need to decorrelate the back from the front
- throwaway77385 11mo agoAh yes, the joy of maintaining open source software. I have seen many devs burn out over the requests made of them. I didn't know it was just one maintainer. That can both be a good thing for keeping the product focused, but it is also worrying, as that's a single point of failure. Anything could happen and then the whole project might fall into disrepair. That factor alone would make me weary of overly relying on Pocketbase. I would hope that if he runs out of time, the project could be handed over to the community, but often the problem is then that we end up with 50 forks, all at different stages of development. I wonder what the best solution to this issue is.
- BrandoElFollito 11mo agoI have some open source I maintain, fortunately, it stays very niche so I am not overwhelmed. But I know the pain. What you are saying about forks is very true. Some very good ideas were started, then semi-abandonned on the way and they ended up with incompatible forks, and finally all of this collapsed. I have no idea what the correct model could be.
- vladstudio 11mo agoI see Pocketbase, I upvote!
- rfc2324 11mo agoI'm a huge fan of Pocketbase. Backing up the sqlite though had me more stressed than I'd prefer, and I wanted a plug-and-play way to sqlite3_rsync a backup while Pocketbase was running: so I've been working on this: https://sqlrsync.com https://sqlrsync.com. MVP works. Billing isn't being checked yet (be gentle but it's Cloudflare Durable Objects underneath so it should be local, fast, and resilient.) Would love feedback from anyone open to trying it.
- pdimitar 11mo agoSorry if my question is misguided: did you try SQLite3's native online backup API? I would not use raw file access knowing they have that.
- rfc2324 11mo agoI'm aware of it but was wanted to create something that I can just quickly point at a running system and make a backup. This is a narrower use case and I accept that it's not for everyone.
- pdimitar 11mo agoI understand but in this case the quicker solution has potentially fatal flaws. With time I have learned to speed-run less things because I've been bitten by the quick and dirty solution probably at least 100 times.
- trailbase 11mo agoLove seeing the love for SQLite. Personally, I've had a great experience with litestream, which will continuously replicate any changes. Are you using https://sqlite.org/rsync.html https://sqlite.org/rsync.html?
- rfc2324 11mo agoLitestream is excellent however I wanted something that I could spin up faster without as much finickyneess as setting g up and securing new S3 credentials, and ideally a way to broadcast out updates. For example I have a sqlite db in my userdir on most servers I (personally) ssh into with "things I'd like to remember" (using dnote for spaced reptition). When I make a change to that file using "dnote", sqlrsync waits until changes stop, performs the sqlite3_rsync, and Cloudflare sends a websocket message to subscribers of that file (me on other servers) to pull down updates when they can. I'd also like to add "dead man's alarms", etc. So it's bells and whistles around an easier-to-use sqlite.org/rsync.
- osbulbul 11mo agoI really like this project too! But i think there is some misunderstanding between pb users and creator. As far as I understand creator making it as complete backend solution and users should write all backend by extending pb. But a lot of user (including me) use pb as database layer only, not as backend. I still write my backend on my project and pb is just like database as a service for me. And much happier than using it as only backend.
- pspeter3 11mo agoI agree but I’ve never been sure what that version of the product looks like then.
- oliwary 11mo agoI can mirror everyone singing praise to pocketbase here. Once you grasp the concepts (which map pretty closely to SQL concepts, with rules for row-based security), it is by far the easiest way IMO to create a maintainable, robust backend with direct auth integrations and a pleasant interface. I have around 5 instances of pocketbase running on a 10 USD/month Hetzner server, serving thousands of users a day without breaking a sweat.
- icemelt8 11mo agoBeware of pocketbase! I am running my startup wetarseel.ai. You'll be badly locked into one instance with one sqlite file, plus its queries are not mapping to SQL, try a bulk delete and it will choke your entire system, plus other footguns.
- coolgoose 11mo agoI am so confused about this message Sounds like an sqllite performance tuning issue than anything else.
- icemelt8 11mo agocheck the benchmarks here https://trailbase.io/reference/benchmarks/ https://trailbase.io/reference/benchmarks/ its clear thats a lot of overhead on top of sqlite
- Yokohiii 11mo agohttps://github.com/pocketbase/pocketbase/blob/master/tools/store/store.go https://github.com/pocketbase/pocketbase/blob/master/tools/s... I wouldn't be surprised if that's the performance issue. It seems to be used as in memory cache for all (?) collections and uses a mutex to access them, even on reads. Most (properly set up) databases are pretty good keeping things cached and with a local socket the latency is low. With this setup I'd be very careful to do my own general purpose caching. The solution here is likely very sub optimal.
- sktrdie 11mo agoHow's this different from... a database? Most modern dbs come with auth and some gui. I guess if you need real-time updates this is cool
- cweagans 11mo agoThis gives you an entire API and GUI on top of a database that you can use to bang together a quick CRUD app. There is even a customizable API rules function that will let you e.g. make sure one users data doesn't show up for some other user. https://pocketbase.io/docs/api-rules-and-filters/ https://pocketbase.io/docs/api-rules-and-filters/
- PUSH_AX 11mo agoI did initially like this, but I didn't really like the experience around extending it. Ultimately I discovered all the cloudflare primitives soon after (eg durable objects etc), the ease, price and performance are just absurd, it feels like cheating.
- ripped_britches 11mo agoI would like to try this. I have tried sqlite and duckdb, both got me started really quickly for an MVP, but then I quickly wished I had MVP’d with supabase because the step of backing up and productionizing was a lot of walking backwards. Maybe just me.
- emehrkay 11mo agoThe source code is structured pretty well. I really like the file abstraction that allows for both local and S3 via the interfaces.
- awinter-py 11mo agoSandstorm (open source PaaS + app ecosystem) didn't make it but was encouraging to me at the time -- a standardized PaaS would seem to drastically reduce the lift to build and to host self-host things. (No shade on compose / helm but have never had a 3rd party compose / helm thing that didn't poop the bed in some way after 6 months) Is that happening here? Is there an ecosystem of other OSS self-host things built on pocketbase?
- leo_e 11mo agoThe "SQLite doesn't scale" argument is usually just premature optimization masquerading as architectural wisdom. Unless you are actively hitting WAL contention limits (which is surprisingly hard to do on modern NVMe), the operational simplicity of a single binary beats the "scalability" of a distributed mess any day. We’ve normalized a complexity tax where every side project "needs" a dedicated DB cluster and a Redis cache. Pocketbase proves that for 99% of CRUD apps, the bottleneck isn't the database—it's the network latency and the developer's time spent managing k8s manifests.
- 9notorp 11mo agoI have a personal blog set up on the cheapest digital ocean droplet and i went ahead with sqlite for it, there is not much traffic on it and i think something like sqlite is actually the best choice for such projects. I did some benchmarking with a rust cli tool, the name i don't recall right now, something like apache bench but simpler. I wouldn't have the same performance if i had mysql or postgres running on the same machine.
- jitl 11mo agofor a 98% read use case like blog SQLite is ideal
- denismenace 11mo agoPersonally the lack of a decimal type make SQLite a no-go for me. Its too much of a hassle to do financial operations completely on the application side.
- born-jre 11mo agoPocketbase is pretty cool, i discovered it few years ago by looking at the projects using goja at the time. since i moved to lua to avoid goja paradox.
- HeavyStorm 11mo agoOpened the link, went to the live app, read the first page of documentation and still doesn't know what this is. Calls itself an "open source backend". A backend for what? Where does it fits in my application architecture? If it's a backend, can I write business rules in it? Is it a framework?
- matt2000 11mo agoIt's the first thing on the linked page: Realtime database Authentication File storage Admin dashboard
- jama211 11mo agoI read their webpage instead of the first page of documentation and got a pretty good idea of what it was, perhaps their documentation is too in the weeds for the overview you’re looking for? Personally I’d describe it as an alternative to firebase, if you’re familiar with that.
- mohas 11mo agoHad I known this I would not have built my own solution
- BoppreH 11mo agoAwesome project, but I'm not a fan of alphanumeric strings used as raw key bytes for AES: https://pocketbase.io/docs/going-to-production/#enable-settings-encryption https://pocketbase.io/docs/going-to-production/#enable-setti... https://github.com/pocketbase/pocketbase/blob/90d896e1cc49e3535dad95718dada3f7efcef4ca/tools/security/encrypt.go#L15 https://github.com/pocketbase/pocketbase/blob/90d896e1cc49e3... The developer doesn't consider this a security issue. I hope they reconsider. Non-standard cryptography is a minefield.
- isaachinman 11mo agoHow or why is this better than InsantDB?
- odie5533 11mo agoProbably easier to self-host Pocketbase. There's a number of competitors: Firebase, Supabase, Pocketbase, TrailBase, InstantDB, Fusio, Nhost.
- chillaranand 11mo agoI used to use other tools like supabase and others for side projects. After discovering pocketbase, I never went back to any of those tools. Works surprisingly well even for mid to large web-apps.