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PGlite – Embeddable Postgres
- avinassh 10mo agoprevious Show HN post submitted by the author (109 comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41224689 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41224689
- u834957920 10mo agoEveryone is trying to copy DuckDB at this point
- cosmotic 10mo agoEmbeddable (into JS et al)
- urtie 10mo agoThere are projects such as https://github.com/wasmerio/wasmer-java https://github.com/wasmerio/wasmer-java and https://wasmtime.dev/ https://wasmtime.dev/ that extend this embeddability to Java, .net, C, C++, rust, Python, Ruby and Go. Wouldn't want to call those 'JS et al'. Ofcourse, that ignores the fact that for many of these languages there are existing libraries and drivers to connect to databases that would not work with this embedded one, but still.
- samwillis 10mo agoWe have a long on running research project with the intention of carting a "libpglite" with a C FFI and compiled as a dynamic library for native embedding. We're making steady progress towards it.
- mythz 10mo agoIt's cool that this is possible, is this just for fun or are there good use-cases for this?
- npodbielski 10mo agoHmm single user website run as HTML from some folder? I guess you could embed this from s3 for multiple users but probably this would be like running multiple engines from the same dir.
- ekjhgkejhgk 10mo ago> Hmm single user website run as HTML from some folder? Why not just sqlite then?
- vincnetas 10mo agoMore SQL functionality?
- somat 10mo agoPostgres features are much nicer, honestly if you are using any sort of orm none of this matters. by design they isolate you from many of the more interesting features of the database. And in general this is probably a good thing. But if you enjoy hand writing artisanal sql postgres is far more pleasant to use than sqlite, not that sqlite is bad, it is very good, just... thin after using pg.
- samwillis 10mo agoIt's now used by a huge number of developers for running local dev environments, and emulating server products (Google firebase and Prisma both embed it in their CLI). Unit testing postgres backed apps is also made significantly easer with it.
- rozenmd 10mo agoI use it for realistic(ish) testing of my hono API, big fan
- dvdkon 10mo agoThis is very cool. Having to always set up a server is one major downside of Postgres, with cumbersome updates being the second. This solves the first and has potential to help with the second. Is there a way to compile this as a native library? I imagine some of the work should be reusable.
- worthless-trash 10mo agoTook the words out of my mouth, i can think of many use cases for this. Imagine being able to go from 'embedded' to 'networked' without having to change any SQL or behavior, so cool.
- evelant 10mo agoYes! I (experimentally) compiled and packaged it for react-native. Postgres on iOS and Android https://github.com/electric-sql/pglite/pull/774 https://github.com/electric-sql/pglite/pull/774
- samwillis 10mo agoThis is such awesome work! We *are* going to get this integrated with the ongoing work for "libpglite".
- patwolf 10mo agoGlad to see it working in react native. It always surprises me that RN doesn't natively support wasm. I've had to avoid other wasm-based libraries, like loro, for that reason.
- evelant 10mo agoYeah, it's unfortunate but it's not really react-native/facebook's fault. Apple doesn't allow any sort of JIT to run on iOS outside of their builtin webkit js engine. That means that AFAIK there's no way to run wasm at reasonable speed on iOS, which means react-native can't really support wasm.
- tdrz 10mo ago
- adhamsalama 10mo agoI tried to use this when I was building a project about peer-to-peer database sharing in the browser using WebAssembly and WebRTC, but I found it a bit heavy so I used SQLite instead. Here's the project if anyone is interested: https://github.com/adhamsalama/sqlite-wasm-webrtc https://github.com/adhamsalama/sqlite-wasm-webrtc
- jherdman 10mo agoI'm using this with a Bun project for my testing needs. I spin PGLite at the beginning, throw it all away at the end. It's not as nice as transactionally isolated testing (a la Ruby on Rails, or Elixir), but it's a fine replacement until I have time to replicate it.
- samwillis 10mo agoHey everyone, I work on PGlite. Excited to see this on HN again. If you have any questions I'll be sure to answer them. We recently crossed a massive usage milestone with over 3M weekly downloads (we're nearly at 4M!) - see https://www.npmjs.com/package/@electric-sql/pglite https://www.npmjs.com/package/@electric-sql/pglite While we originally built this for embedding into web apps, we have seen enormous growth in devtools and developer environments - both Google Firebase and Prisma have embedded PGlite into their CLIs to emulate their server products.
- oulipo2 10mo agoI'm interested to use Pglite for local unit-testing, but I'm using timescaledb in prod, do you think you will have this extension pre-built for Pglite?
- samwillis 10mo agoI'm not aware of anything trying to compile timescale for it. Some extensions are easer than other, if there is limited (or ideally no) network IO and its written in C (Timescale is!) with minimal dependencies then its a little easer to get them working.
- rel 10mo agoI’ve had incredible success with testcontainers for local unit-testing
- tdrz 10mo agoWe have a walk-through on porting extensions to PGlite: https://pglite.dev/extensions/development#building-postgres-extensions https://pglite.dev/extensions/development#building-postgres-...
- mentalgear 10mo agoYupp, this has big potential for local-first !
- nnnnico 10mo agoThis is awesome, thanks for your work! Could this work with the file system api in the bowser to write to user disk instead of indexeddb? I'm interested in easy ways for syncing fot local-first single user stuff <3 thanks again
- qazswx 10mo agoccc
- widenrun 10mo agoUsing this for testing... it feels like a sweet spot between in-memory SQLite and spinning up a full Postgres instance. I'd been looking for this for a while and I'm pretty happy with the faster tests. And so far no blockers from its limitations.
- exceptione 10mo agoAre people using this in SPA applications with success? I saw on the website that syncing via ElectricSQL is in alpha and that no CRDT is available, afaik. Any other options? Also, I guess pgsql extensions are out of scope? Nonetheless, this could be interesting for data heavy SPA's.
- samwillis 10mo agoThere are a few people using it in prod for customer facing web apps. Extensions are also available - we have a list here: https://pglite.dev/extensions/ https://pglite.dev/extensions/. We would love to extend the availability of more, some are more complex than others though. We are getting close to getting PostGIS to work, there is an open PR that anyone is welcome to pick up and hack on.
- compoundedges 10mo agoWe have been using it for the last 8 months in production at CompoundingEdges. It's been great for allowing users to generate large amounts (100-300k records/day) of their own isolated data and automatically persist it to their local machine. The only hiccup we have had had been throttling data to be saved via the webworker. We are not syncing with Electric, but I've heard good things about it.
- alexisread 10mo agoCan this be used as a read-replica to a normal PG instance? I'm thinking synced browser cache here.
- samwillis 10mo agoYou can use http://electric-sql.com http://electric-sql.com to sync into PGlite in the browser from postgres. There are docs here: https://pglite.dev/docs/sync https://pglite.dev/docs/sync
- kburman 10mo agoThis looks impressive. Could someone familiar with Postgres internals explain the hidden trade-offs of this approach? I understand the obvious limitations of it being embedded/single-host, but I'm curious about the engine itself. Does running in this environment compromise standard features like ACID compliance, parallel query execution, or the ecosystem of tools/extensions we usually rely on?
- samwillis 10mo agoThe key limitation (at the moment) is that it only supports a single connection. W're planning to lift that limitation though.
- sigseg1v 10mo agoThis is what I'm most interested in. I have an application which has a smaller trimmed down client version but it shares a lot of code with the larger full version of itself. Part of that code is query logic and it's very dependent on multiple connections and even the simplest transactions on it will deadlock without multiple connections. Right now if one wants to use the Postgres option, it needs Postgres manually installed and connected to it which is a mess. It would be the dream to have a way to easily ship Postgres in a small to medium sized app in a enterprise-Windows-sysadmin-friendly way and be able to use the same Postgres queries.
- korale 10mo agoWas going to ask exactly about that. Thanks for sharing. Looking forward to it!
- tdrz 10mo agoYou might want to have a look at our extensions catalog page: https://pglite.dev/extensions/ https://pglite.dev/extensions/
- stacktrace 10mo agoReally cool project! We had a situation a while back where some of our e2e tests needed the DB to be in very specific states. Technically we could have handled it with fixtures/transactions/schema resets, but doing that cleanly across a bunch of tests was pretty painful in our setup at the time For a few edge-case scenarios we ended up mocking the DB layer (which obviously stops being a true e2e test). Something like PgLite would've been a perfect middle ground - real Postgres, zero container overhead, easy to spin up isolated instances per test, and a clean slate for every run.
- TonyAlicea10 10mo agoOne thing this (and any browser-embeddable data store) are fantastic for is vibe coding interactive prototypes for user research. AI-generated code that doesn’t need to be production ready has been a real boon to usability and design work. Testing with users something that actually saves and displays data, and seeding the app with realistic-looking datasets in both shape and size, reveals usability issues that you just don’t discover in Figma prototypes. If a product team isn’t performing user research with interactive prototypes as a core part of their dev and design lifecycle, they’re doing themselves a real disservice. It’s so easy now.
- bhouston 10mo agoVery neat. Impressive performance: https://pglite.dev/benchmarks https://pglite.dev/benchmarks Even has Drizzle ORM integration: https://orm.drizzle.team/docs/connect-pglite https://orm.drizzle.team/docs/connect-pglite I will explore this for use in my unit / integration tests. It looks pretty amazing. I am confused why all my recent compiled tooling (tsgo, biomejs) are shipping native binaries (thus creating multiple binaries, one per supported platform) and not WASM tools that can run cross platform? Is it because of startup times, poor tooling, etc?
- jitl 10mo agopeople want their programs to go as fast as possible, WASM can be better than writing JS but it’s not as fast as actually native code by a wide margin, especially if you want to do io
- guardian5x 10mo agoWhat is the advantage of using something like this instead of the IndexedDB Browser Feature
- lgas 10mo agoYou get all the features of postgres.
- Drakim 10mo agoI was shocked to discover how incredibly poorly IndexedDB works. I always thought it would be fast and snappy if a bit alien. But nope, it's incredibly bad! Despite being a native feature to the browser it's incredibly slow, and the way it works in terms of fetching records based on non-primary keys forces you to either load your entire dataset into RAM at once or iterate though it record-by-record in a slow callback. Something as trivial as 10k records can bring your webapp to a crawl.
- orthecreedence 10mo agoI've built some pretty intensive stuff in indexeddb and it was the only thing I've ever done, using native browser features, that I could get to consistently crash the browsers I tested it on (granted, this was many years ago). On top of that, the API is so ugly. I cannot believe indexeddb won over websql (when every browser ever already embeds sqlite). What a shame.
- lionelholt 10mo agoI wonder if those issues are resolved by using the Dexie.js wrapper, because I've had no problems with that.
- Drakim 10mo agoIt does not, I've also used Dexie.js. Your usecase has most likely been too small to run into the very annoying walls.
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- huzaifah0x00 10mo agoThis is interesting, I've been looking for something like this that I can use in unit/integration tests. I've used the mongodb memory server for testing but never found something like that for Postgres that didn't require running a full PG server instance... Definitely going to try this out for tests and see how it goes.
- throw_m239339 10mo agoIs there a PGlite but like SQlite (so without a running a server), just with the PG flavor of SQL instead of Sqlite's?
- oamaok 10mo agoAt work we started building a new internal service and decided to try this out for the test setup. We built a small wrapper which seamlessly uses PGLite when running tests and actual Postgres instance otherwise. Great success! The ability to .clone() the database to create "checkpoints" is also great for tests, as we can run all of the migrations and return to that clean state between each test. Running 50 test suites in parallel is also so easy with this setup.
- lateforwork 10mo agoThere is also Doltgres [1] which is a single-file Postgres. Just like Deno you download and run a single .exe file and voila! you have Postgres! [1] https://docs.doltgres.com/introduction/installation https://docs.doltgres.com/introduction/installation
- bbkane 10mo agoI'd love to to use PGLite in a non-JavaScript runtime. For example, embed PGLite into my Go CLI with a WASM runtime and use PGLite as a replacement for SQLite. https://github.com/electric-sql/pglite/issues/89 https://github.com/electric-sql/pglite/issues/89 makes it sound like there's "third-party" bindings for Rust. Is there any interest in "official" PGLite bindings to other languages?
- papa0101 10mo agoyep PGLite + Go would be great!
- spicypixel 10mo agoYeah would really make testing a tonne easier.
- tmikaeld 10mo agoIs it just me or is downloading 3MB for the DB runtime plus the database itself, kind of crazy? At this point, this should be built into the browser which could fetch signed db data and be extremely performant.
- iamcreasy 10mo agoIs there similar attempt for MySQL?
- buremba 10mo agoPGlite is fantastic. I use it for my in-browser PostgreSQL server for development. It implements the PG protocol on the server; when clients connect, we forward queries to the user's browser, which runs PGlite under the hood. The result is a PG server that fully lives in your browser: https://dbfor.dev https://dbfor.dev
- nextaccountic 10mo agohow is this different from pglite itself? pglite also runs in the browser
- buremba 10mo agoPGlite is embedded so you can't really connect to PGlite using the PG clients. Dbfor.dev runs the PG protocol in the server and use Websockets & PGlite so any PG client can connect to your browser using PG protocol. The hard work is done by PGlite and we use PGlite, it just enables PGlite to be accessible from everywhere.
- replwoacause 10mo agoWish there was a way to use this with .NET
- odie5533 10mo agoFor unit testing, I still use TestContainers which spins a full Postgres in Docker. But new alternatives like this make py-pglite (https://github.com/wey-gu/py-pglite https://github.com/wey-gu/py-pglite) possible which is Python unit testing with PGlite. Even so, for Python unit testing I'm more confident in something like pgserver (https://github.com/orm011/pgserver https://github.com/orm011/pgserver) which offers the full, real Postgres in a lightweight pip package. Note: my take is specifically for unit testing, not other use cases!
- theptip 10mo agoWhat are the trade-offs you’ve seen between the two? Always appreciate this sort of experience report on HN!
- Robdel12 10mo agoThe last time I ended up trying something like this I was implementing postgres features that the mocks didn’t. Now, I just tested against a real database in a docker container. I have over 1k tests that run about 1.5 mins. I’m pretty happy with that. I guess given that, testing isn’t quite the use case for this (for me). Wonder what else this could be used for.
- _fzslm 10mo agoI'm so optimistic about this, especially in the context of local-first web applications. With Postgres on both the client and the server, and something like PowerSync or ElectricSQL to keep the two together, you get a homomorphic database environment between client and the server. That has a lot of architectural benefits I'm actively exploring. The client and the server can share a lot more code, for one. But I read the following posts, and I have some serious concerns about PGlite's performance: https://antoine.fi/sqlite-sync-engine-with-reactivity https://antoine.fi/sqlite-sync-engine-with-reactivity – describes memory leaks, minute-long db startup time, and huge slowdowns with live queries https://github.com/marcus-pousette/sqlite3-bench https://github.com/marcus-pousette/sqlite3-bench - shows performance dropping to multi-second territory for inserts and lookups, compared to sqlite which is significantly faster It sadly makes me slightly skeptical about adopting what effectively feels like a hack... SQLite has obviously had decades of adoption and I'm not expecting PGlite to match that level of legacy or optimisation - but it's enough to give me pause. I really, really want to adopt PGlite in a project I'm currently architecting, so would love some insight on this if anybody has any!
- RichardChu 10mo agoI was evaluating local storage solutions a while back and I tried setting up PGlite, but unfortunately I couldn't get it to work in Next.js with Turbopack in a web worker. I've been using SQLite locally instead with wa-sqlite and it's been working great for my use case so far. It's also more lightweight.
- eduction 10mo agoHow are you measuring "lightweight" here, what do you mean by it? (Not doubting your claim this just seems one of those words that means many different things depending on the context.)
- RichardChu 10mo agoPrimarily bundle size. Pglite is a 3 MB binary, SQLite is <1 MB.
- manzout 10mo agoOh, I thought i hallucinated this last night
- nunobrito 10mo agoHello, can you please summarize the advantages of PGLite compared to SQLite? I've never used Postgres before, my work is mostly on the embedded domain using files and a lot of browser execution on the client side. With SQLite there is simplicity attached to the databases, with PGLite I see a lot of interesting extensions to try out but what would the big difference when compared to SQLite?
- richbell 10mo agoThe main use case, in my opinion, is for tests/CI. SQLite has traditionally been used to quickly run tests, however, if your actual infra uses PostgreSQL then the value is limited.
- CyberDildonics 10mo agoYou think the main use for sqlite is running tests?
- trillic 10mo agoI think they meant sqlite is often used in CI/CD testing environments as an alternative to running a client/server database in these environments. For simple crud webapps, or frameworks that are db agnostic it works well.
- Fuzzwah 10mo agoMy read is that the person you're responding to thinks that pglite could be a better fit than sqlite for ci/cd, where currently sqlite is used. Not that testing is the main use of sqlite.
- mrinterweb 10mo agoWhen I heard embedded postgres and sync, I immediately thought of pg's logical replication. ElectricSQL looks cool, but any chance of pg's native logical replication working with this?
- tdrz 10mo agoYes, we believe PostgreSQL's native logical replication is possible with PGlite. We have some ideas on how to achieve it, but we need more time to try them out.
- ianberdin 10mo agoAn amazing project. I have built a playground for it today: https://playcode.io/sql-editor https://playcode.io/sql-editor (Full feature set, including extensions, pgdump, database explorer, indexedDB, vscode editor, etc). Free. No ads. No bs.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- aperture147 10mo agoTechinically I can build a Postgres DB on Durable Object on Cloudflare right? I'm kinda tired of SQLite migration cascading all of my tables now. Has anyone tried to implement that on DO?