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Open Source
561 posts about Open Source. Every summary links to the original.
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Trusted Language Extensions for Postgres
Cloud Postgres providers often restrict extension installation until extensions are vetted, leaving some useful functionality unavailable on hosted databases. A Trusted Language Extension (TLE) is a Postgres extension written in a trusted language, allowing installation through pg_tle without placing code on the server filesystem. The source explains that conventional extensions may include SQL and functions implemented in languages such as C, while trusted languages follow PostgreSQL's security rules and cannot access raw process memory or system functions. AWS developed pg_tle, and collaboration with Supabase makes it available on Supabase and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 14.5 and higher; the dbdev registry can install packages such as langchain-embedding_search through SQL migrations. TLEs are presented as a way to distribute and iterate on trusted extensions without waiting for each cloud provider to preinstall them.
Supabase Edge Runtime: Self-hosted Deno Functions
Supabase has open-sourced Edge Runtime, an MIT-licensed Rust web server built on Deno Runtime 1.32+ for self-hosting Deno Edge Functions. It serves TypeScript, JavaScript, and WASM functions, and existing Supabase Edge Functions can run without code changes; the release also adds npm modules and Node built-in APIs. The Supabase CLI uses it to serve all local functions with JWT verification, import maps, custom environment variables, hot reload, and defaults of 150 MB memory and 60 seconds execution time. Its architecture combines hyper, a Main Worker in a V8 isolate, and restricted User Workers that handle requests with controllable resource limits, while exposing APIs intended to improve development and deployment parity. A Fly.io demonstration shows deployment, with Digital Ocean and AWS also cited as provider options; the project is in beta with bugs and performance quirks still expected.
Supabase Logs: open source logging server
Supabase is releasing Supabase Logs for self-hosted users and CLI development, built around Logflare, which processes more than 1 billion log events daily from Supabase services. Logflare is a multi-node, highly available Elixir cluster that ingests events through Vector or native integrations, streams them to BigQuery, and exposes SQL-backed HTTP Endpoints for Studio, Logs Explorer, and usage charts. Endpoints support parameterized queries, in-memory read-through caching, configurable cache warming, and select-only query sandboxing, allowing views over billions of daily events without querying many terabytes on every request. The release changes Logflare’s license to Apache 2.0, replaces closed-source SQL parsing with rust-based sqlparser-rs, and improves environment-based configuration for self-hosting; BigQuery is currently the supported backend, with more planned.
Supabase Beta March 2023
Supabase’s March 2023 update previews Launch Week 7, an accompanying Web3 AI hackathon, and a collection of community projects and resources. It announces a Next.js OpenAI documentation-search template hosted on Vercel, combining GPT-3 text completion, a Postgres database with pgvector, and Deno Edge Functions. The update also documents the Launch Week ticket system, including an AI-fueled design and an infinite ticket scroll built with Next.js, Framer Motion, and Supabase, with separate posts covering implementation and artwork generation. It additionally promotes the SupaClub April 1 announcement, a Launch Week kickoff Twitter Space, and projects such as Markprompt, which creates embeddings from Markdown, Markdoc, and MDX files in GitHub repositories using Next.js, Vercel, OpenAI, and Supabase.
Designing with AI: Generating unique artwork for every user
Supabase Launch Week 7 needed distinctive, shareable tickets that could improve on earlier Launch Week designs while keeping overlaid text readable. The team experimented with Midjourney prompts and blends, then chose minimalist purple swirls and a gold overlay approach after finding generated visuals too chaotic and direct gold prompting unreliable. For each ticket, a Supabase Edge Function retrieves a cached PNG from Supabase Storage or renders HTML and CSS into an SVG with Vercel’s Satori, layering backgrounds, a GitHub profile picture, and text before uploading the result with long cache control. A Postgres view selectively exposes ticket fields, calculates referral counts and marks a ticket golden when both Twitter and LinkedIn sharing have been detected, while row-level security protects the underlying email-containing table. Supabase Realtime then sends client-side updates so users can see progress and stop listening once golden.
The Supabase AI Hackathon
Supabase announced an async, AI-themed hackathon running from 6:00 am PT on 7 April 2023 until 11:59 pm PT on 16 April 2023. Participants may enter individually or in teams of up to five and must create a new Open Source project using Supabase in some capacity; projects can be apps, tools, libraries, or other forms, in any language or framework. Entries compete for overall, AI, fun or Easter egg, technical, and visual categories, with a winner and runner-up in each category receiving Supabase Launch Week swag, while the overall winner also receives mechanical keyboards. The Supabase team will judge creativity, functionality, visual quality, technical achievement, Supabase usage, and fun, and submissions require source-code links, with an optional demo video earning extra points.
Improving the Developer Experience with the Ruby LSP
The Ruby LSP is a language server intended to improve Ruby’s developer experience by providing editor features through the Language Server Protocol, without typechecking code or requiring type annotations. It targets performance and stability in Shopify’s Core monolith, where it must analyze thousands of files that may themselves contain thousands of lines, and is opinionated toward Ruby on Rails. The article explains LSP’s client-server model, in which editors exchange JSON requests and responses over STDIN and STDOUT, then focuses on nonpositional features such as Folding Range, including document synchronization and parsing. It also outlines future work on parallel request processing, codebase indexing, caching, and a plugin system for framework-specific capabilities such as Rails navigation and model information.
New zoom freezing feature for Geohash plugin
Grab introduced a zoom freeze capability to its Geohash plugin for the Java OpenStreetMap Editor (JOSM). Previously, zooming in or out forced the plugin to calculate and render new geohashes automatically, causing visual clutter when users needed to focus on a specific region. The updated interface introduces a toggle label allowing editors to switch between enabling and disabling zoom freezing. While frozen, the current geohash boundaries remain locked during map scaling, and options to show smaller or larger geohashes are disabled. Disabling the feature instantly updates the display with the appropriate geohash subdivisions for the current zoom level.
The Case Against Monkey Patching, From a Rails Core Team Member
The post argues that Ruby monkey patches—global changes to existing objects or libraries—should be used sparingly because they are brittle, dangerous, and often unnecessary. They can make Rails and Ruby upgrades harder by depending on private APIs, leave applications exposed to vulnerabilities if security fixes are not mirrored, and accumulate poorly documented technical debt. One Shopify example, activerecord-pedant-adapter, changes Active Record’s MySQL2Adapter so database connections report MySQL query warnings; upstreaming that behavior into Rails allowed the gem to be archived and the patch removed. The recommended alternative is to investigate whether an upgrade or documentation resolves the issue, fix genuine defects upstream, and, when patching is unavoidable, document and test it while maintaining a removal plan.
How to build a real-time multiplayer game with Flutter Flame
The tutorial builds a real-time multiplayer shooting game with Flutter, the Flame game engine, and Supabase Realtime. Each player controls a UFO by dragging, while the game automatically fires bullets in three directions; opponents’ positions and health points are synchronized over Supabase’s low-latency web socket connection. The implementation starts with Flutter widgets for the game page and lobby, then defines Flame components for the game, players, bullets, collision detection, movement, and health changes, before wiring Supabase broadcast events to client updates. A lobby waits for at least another player, and starting a match creates a shared channel so both clients can begin together. The completed application supports gameplay and a post-game dialog, allowing players to return to the lobby without managing their own networking infrastructure.
Supabase Beta January 2023
Supabase’s January 2023 beta update gathers releases across Postgres, GraphQL, Edge Functions, client libraries, image transformation, and self-hosting. The update adds pgvector, a PostgreSQL extension for storing OpenAI embeddings and performing vector similarity search, and presents Supabase Clippy, a one-week, fully open-source documentation-search MVP combining pgvector with OpenAI. pg_graphql now supports Views, Materialized Views, and Foreign Tables, while Image Transformations enable automatic WebP conversion by default, with format: origin available to opt out. Other changes include Python and C# reference documentation, pg_repack, multi-tab authentication logout through BroadcastChannel, lz4 compression, ICU locales, downloadable Edge Function source, and a DigitalOcean deployment guide using Sendgrid, Packer, and Terraform. Supabase also reports reaching 45,000 GitHub stars and a position among the top 200 most-popular repositories.
Supabase Clippy: ChatGPT for Supabase Docs
Supabase introduced “Supabase Clippy,” a ChatGPT-like interface trained on its documentation, as a hidden MVP in the Supabase docs. It responds to questions by retrieving relevant documentation and streaming GPT-3's answer in realtime. The implementation parses docs into sections, creates OpenAI embeddings, stores them in Postgres with pgvector, and injects matching documents as context for generation. The project was motivated by the growth of Supabase's product suite and documentation, plus the need to support developers unfamiliar with Postgres; the current version uses only Guides and is presented as a one-week MVP intended to gather feedback. Planned directions include adding reference docs and community discussions, caching repeated queries, thumbs-up relevance feedback, and interactive guidance.
From Farmer to Security Engineer: How Dev Degree Helped Me Find My Dream Job
Cailyn Edwards recounts how she moved from leaving high school and running an organic farm to a career in infrastructure security through Shopify’s Dev Degree program. Before entering the program, she completed a horticulture co-diploma, finished high school and the required math courses, and pursued computer science while needing to pay her mortgage and maintain work-life balance. Dev Degree’s training path and rotating placements exposed her to computer science fundamentals, pair programming, Ruby on Rails on the orders team, infrastructure security, and network foundations, leading her to discover a strong interest in cyber security and cloud infrastructure. After graduating in September 2021, she joined Infrastructure Security full-time and later reports projects, internal security talks, a promotion to Senior Infrastructure Engineer, and Kubernetes contributions including a contributor award.
Supabase Beta December 2022
Supabase's December 2022 beta update recaps Launch Week 6, Community Day, Postgres ecosystem work, and other recent releases. The announcements include redesigned documentation rebuilt with Next.js; Storage v2 features for image resizing, webhooks, and a Smart CDN; and multi-factor authentication with optional enforcement through Row Level Security. Supabase Wrappers extend PostgreSQL Foreign Data Wrappers to query external databases, systems, and third-party APIs using SQL, while The Vault enters beta for encrypted secrets and stored data. The update also announces custom domains, point-in-time recovery, SSO on the dashboard in preparation for SAML, and ecosystem projects including pg_graphql v1.0, a PostgREST 11 pre-release, and an experimental pg_crdt extension.
React Native Skia: A Year in Review and a Look Ahead
React Native Skia’s first year produced an initial alpha and 89 additional releases, evolving a React Renderer and Skia integration for declarative 2D graphics across iOS, Android, the Web, and Node.js testing. The project changed direction after identifying two bottlenecks: dependence on the JavaScript thread and the overhead of thousands of JSI allocations in large drawings. Skia DOM addresses them with a declarative drawing state that recomputes only necessary changes and executes drawings on the UI thread, with C++ implementations on iOS and Android and a JavaScript implementation on React Native Web. CanvasKit compatibility, Expo integration, Metal on iOS, and OpenGL on Android and the Web support the cross-platform design, while extension points enable modules such as Skottie and camera-frame effects. The library’s tests compare rendered examples across platforms, and planned work includes JavaScript-worklet and Reanimated animation integration plus advanced text layouts through Skia’s paragraph module.
Launch Week 6: Wrap Up
Supabase’s Launch Week Day 6 wrap-up consolidates the products and platform changes announced during the event. The roundup announces redesigned Next.js documentation, Storage v2 features for image resizing, webhooks, and a Smart CDN, plus multi-factor authentication usable in Row Level Security policies. It also introduces Wrappers, an Alpha framework for connecting Postgres to external systems, Vault for encrypted secrets, and pg_graphql 1.0 with general availability. Additional releases include dashboard-enabled point-in-time recovery for Pro Projects, custom domains, pg_crdt, PostgreSQL 15 for new projects, a PostgREST 11 pre-release, and the PGroonga multilingual full-text search extension. Community partnerships with Flutterflow and OneSignal provide Flutter app development and push-notification integrations.
Point in Time Recovery is now available for Pro projects
Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR) is now available to eligible Pro Plan projects, expanding access beyond Enterprise customers and adding a Dashboard UI for enabling it. Projects created from August 2022 onward can enable PITR except in Northeast Asia / Seoul, and they must use the Small compute add-on; older projects are not yet generally eligible. The system combines daily physical database snapshots with archived Write Ahead Log (WAL) records, using the open-source WAL-G tool; snapshots are uploaded daily and WAL files are archived as transactions occur. WAL files are backed up at two-minute intervals, potentially faster when a file threshold is reached, reducing the recovery point from the up-to-24-hour exposure of daily backups. PITR backups retain up to seven days by default, with self-serve expansion to 28 days, and restoration can target a specified point in time.
Shopify Embraces Rust for Systems Programming
Shopify has adopted Rust as its official systems programming language while retaining Ruby for server-side business logic, and has joined the Rust Foundation. The change addresses growing systems-programming needs including high-performance network servers, Ruby native extensions, and WebAssembly, where Shopify seeks speed, productivity, safety, and community-driven open source. Shopify cites Rust’s predictable native-code performance, fine-grained memory control, compile-time safety, support for concurrency, and interoperability with C and Ruby through tools and crates such as bindgen, rb-sys, and magnus. The company says Rust performed strongly in its safety evaluation and that its initial projects exposed more errors at compile time, while acknowledging that performance still depends on design and measurement and that internal education, tooling, and community participation remain unfinished work.
Supabase Storage v2: Image resizing and Smart CDN
Supabase Storage introduces image resizing, webhooks, and a Smart CDN, positioning them as components of an on-demand image delivery system. Resizing uses imgproxy and supports width, height, and contain, cover, or fill modes through JavaScript clients or direct Storage API requests; images are not enlarged beyond their original dimensions, and aspect ratio is preserved by default. The Smart CDN stores resized results using cache keys based on an Etag, tenant ID, bucket, and image name, while webhook-driven metadata updates propagate invalidations globally within about 60 seconds. Image Resizing is beta for Pro and Enterprise customers, with 100 transformed images per project at no additional cost and $5 per additional 1,000; self-hosting is free.
pg_crdt - an experimental CRDT extension for Postgres
Supabase announces pg_crdt, an experimental Postgres extension that adds CRDT support as a data type for collaborative and offline-oriented applications. It frames CRDTs as structures whose updates can be merged in any order to reach the same final state, avoiding the last-write-wins behavior of ordinary arrays. A content column can use crdt.ydoc, backed by Yjs, while the extension also supports Automerge through Rust libraries wrapped with pgx. The post contrasts storing CRDTs directly in Postgres with making Realtime an authoritative server, favoring the database-centered approach for simpler architecture and broader tooling, while noting that the decision is unsettled and pg_crdt is not released on the Supabase platform. Known limitations include full-document WAL broadcasts, increased WAL and dead tuples for frequently updated documents, and serialization overhead for large CRDT values.
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