# Supabase
> Open-source backend platform providing PostgreSQL databases, authentication, storage, realtime APIs, and serverless functions.

## Articles

### [Supabase Hacktoberfest 2020](https://yomu.fyi/post/supabase-hacktoberfest-2020.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: Thor Schaeff
- Published: Sep 11, 2020

Supabase announced its participation in Hacktoberfest 2020 by organizing a series of community events and open-source contribution activities. Contributors can attend scheduled live broadcasts, including a GitHub Open Source Friday stream featuring @kiwicopple on Twitch alongside an online introductory meetup hosted on YouTube. To coordinate development, Supabase launched a GitHub project board containing tasks and idea notes, requiring participants to label new issues with the hacktoberfest tag for official challenge qualification. Available engineering efforts span creating framework examples for Blitz.js and Redwood.js as well as writing specialized Postgres templates for diverse use cases. Non-code contribution pathways are also supported, encouraging community members to submit documentation improvements, user experience adjustments, illustrations, custom loading pages, or Lottie animations.


### [Supabase Alpha August 2020](https://yomu.fyi/post/supabase-alpha-august-2020.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: Paul Copplestone
- Published: Sep 3, 2020

Six months into developing its hosted database platform, Supabase announced updates focusing on authentication, table view management, and community developer tooling. Users can now create database tables and columns directly from the table view interface as well as invite team members to their organizations. The authentication system introduced configurable email confirmations for new user registrations, allowing administrators to toggle confirmations and edit email templates directly from the dashboard. Community contributors added TypeScript support to Supabase, implemented UMD support in supabase-js, and began building Python client libraries starting with postgrest-py. Supabase is preparing to transition from Alpha to Beta by stabilizing its Auth API, improving dashboard performance, and benchmarking platform systems.


### [Supabase Auth](https://yomu.fyi/post/supabase-auth.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: Paul Copplestone
- Published: Aug 5, 2020

Following an early community launch on Hacker News, the open-source Firebase alternative Supabase faced heavy developer demand for a dedicated authentication and authorization solution. In response, the team evaluated existing open-source tools such as KeyCloak and Kratos before landing on an architecture combining a forked Netlify GoTrue server with PostgreSQL and PostgREST. The resulting Supabase Auth system provides client methods like signUp and signIn alongside authorization powered by PostgreSQL Row Level Security and policies. By leveraging SQL policies to enforce access rules directly in the database, developers avoid repetitive middleware filtering while maintaining granular access controls. Future roadmap plans include adding third-party OAuth providers, custom email templates, and simplified policy management interfaces for non-technical users.


### [Continuous PostgreSQL Backups using WAL-G](https://yomu.fyi/post/continuous-postgresql-backups-using-wal-g.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: Angelico de los Reyes
- Published: Aug 2, 2020

Continuous PostgreSQL backups require coordinating physical base snapshots with ongoing write-ahead log archiving to support point-in-time recovery. The open-source WAL-G utility simplifies this workflow by managing backup pushes and fetches to cloud storage services such as Amazon S3. In a typical setup on Ubuntu with PostgreSQL 12, envdir supplies AWS credentials and storage prefixes to WAL-G commands embedded directly in the PostgreSQL archive configuration. Regular base backups can be automated via cron jobs, which minimizes the volume of WAL archives that must be replayed during a restore. When recovering to a new instance, administrators fetch the latest base backup, define a restore command with targeted recovery timestamps in the configuration, and initiate replay using a recovery signal file.


### [Supabase Alpha July 2020](https://yomu.fyi/post/supabase-alpha-july-2020.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: Paul Copplestone
- Published: Aug 2, 2020

Supabase announced the release of Supabase Auth following five months of development, providing resources and a video tutorial on implementing authentication with PostgreSQL Row Level Security. The Table Editor now allows users to drill multiple levels deep into table relationships as well as add, delete, and download rows directly. Newly created projects also include access to additional Postgres extensions, including pgsql-http, pgjwt, plpgsql\_check, and pljava. Further platform updates include an or filter in the client library, expanded capabilities for the postgres-meta REST management server, and persistence for open tabs in the Table View. Additionally, the auto-generated documentation now integrates authentication guides, and visual page transition glitches have been resolved.


### [Alpha Launch Postmortem](https://yomu.fyi/post/alpha-launch-postmortem.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: Paul Copplestone
- Published: Jul 10, 2020

An unexpected viral submission on Hacker News prompted sudden alpha traffic for Supabase, attracting 30,000 visitors and over 1,400 signups in one week. The surge strained initial infrastructure, which initially relied on a single server running Docker Compose for middleware and Digital Ocean for customer databases. System bottlenecks emerged rapidly, including hit limits on Digital Ocean droplet counts, frequent physical server faults, and a three-hour provisioning outage when Cloudflare reached its 1,000-subdomain limit. In response, the team migrated middleware to multiple globally load-balanced ECS clusters via AWS Global Accelerator. Supabase also transitioned 1,800 servers from Digital Ocean to AWS t3a instances, nearly halving database startup times from 90 seconds to 50 seconds.


### [What are PostgreSQL Templates?](https://yomu.fyi/post/what-are-postgresql-templates.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: Angelico de los Reyes
- Published: Jul 9, 2020

PostgreSQL bases every new database creation on an existing template database within the cluster, defaulting to template1. While administrators can directly modify template1 with tables, data, extensions, or procedural languages, altering it risks breaking future database creation commands if mistakes happen. Setting an existing database as a custom template using the ALTER DATABASE command allows users with the CREATEDB privilege to instantiate customized databases without polluting system templates. Any database creation from a template requires zero active connections on that template at execution time, making pg\_dump the preferred tool for replicating active production environments. The immutable template0 system database serves as a fallback to recreate corrupted templates, restore clean dumps, or initialize databases with alternative character encodings.


### [Physical vs Logical Backups in PostgreSQL](https://yomu.fyi/post/physical-vs-logical-backups-in-postgresql.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: Angelico de los Reyes
- Published: Jul 7, 2020

PostgreSQL backups fall into two distinct categories: logical backups, which convert data into SQL command files, and physical backups, which copy the underlying file system storage. Logical backups generated with pg\_dump or pg\_dumpall allow single-database targeting and provide the only practical route for migrating across major Postgres versions with differing internal storage formats. Conversely, physical backups suit larger databases where long-running logical exports can degrade concurrent query performance and risk failure. Physical backups also integrate with Write Ahead Log files through tools like WAL-G to support Point in Time Recovery and minimize Recovery Point Objectives. Selecting between these two strategies depends on whether administrative simplicity, version portability, cluster size, or precise disaster recovery takes precedence.


### [Supabase Alpha June 2020](https://yomu.fyi/post/supabase-alpha-june-2020.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: Paul Copplestone
- Published: Jul 1, 2020

Four months into development, Supabase released its June 2020 alpha update focused on simplifying PostgreSQL management and eliminating regional performance bottlenecks. The release introduces a spreadsheet-like interface for drilling down into relational tables alongside automated detection and editing support for JSON and JSONB columns. To address latency issues previously caused by hosting all projects exclusively in Singapore, the platform now allows developers to select specific database regions. In line with its zero lock-in principle, Supabase exposed daily backups on the dashboard and enhanced the SQL editor with improved syntax highlighting. The team also expanded by hiring PostgREST maintainer Steve Chavez while continuing efforts toward future multi-region replication and WAL-G backup integration.


### [Supabase Alpha May 2020](https://yomu.fyi/post/supabase-alpha-may-2020.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: Paul Copplestone
- Published: Jun 1, 2020

Supabase announced its May 2020 alpha development updates following acceptance into a fully remote Y Combinator cohort and unexpected attention from Hacker News. Operating under a ship early and often philosophy, the team continued deploying functional changes despite ongoing alpha bugs and platform instability. This milestone includes a revamped user interface configured to support incoming product capabilities alongside an initial, experimental Table View designed to rival tools like Airtable. Furthermore, Supabase rolled out realtime listeners that allow developers to subscribe to database changes comparable to Firebase functionality. The platform also added instant RESTful APIs and auto-updating documentation generated dynamically by introspecting modifications to the underlying Postgres schema.


### [Supabase Alpha April 2020](https://yomu.fyi/post/supabase-alpha-april-2020.md)
- Company: [Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase.md)
- Author: Paul Copplestone
- Published: May 1, 2020

The April 2020 alpha release of Supabase introduces developer tools designed to make Postgres as straightforward to use as Firebase. Users can configure a Postgres instance in less than two minutes and execute database queries directly from the dashboard interface. The platform provides auto-generated RESTful APIs along with auto-updating documentation created through database schema introspection. Development work also encompasses realtime listeners for database change subscriptions, query performance analysis tools, and connectors that route realtime updates to queues or webhooks. Supabase is not yet production ready, storing only GitHub usernames and emails while running for free under Digital Ocean's startup program.


[Newer posts](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase/page/4.md)