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Pocketbase – open-source realtime back end in 1 file(pocketbase.io)
231 points by modinfo 6 hours ago | 89 comments
  • throwaway7738531 minutes ago

    I 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.

  • olavan hour ago

    I love it and use it for personal projects and internal tools. I tend to combine it with 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.

    • phlan hour ago |parent

      What is Lagrange? I couldn’t find any project in the context of LLM or knowledge graph.

      • foul35 minutes ago |parent

        They said they hacked a Gemini server, Lagrange is a Geminispace browser.

        https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange

        • stavros7 minutes ago |parent

          I also somehow thought a Google Gemini MCP server.

      • andsoitis39 minutes ago |parent

        There 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.

  • Humphrey2 hours ago

    I'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.

    • JodieBenitez2 hours ago |parent

      Django has great GIS integration. How does Pocketbase compare here ? Also, can Pocketbase work with PostgreSQL or is it SQLite only ?

      • Humphreyan hour ago |parent

        SQLite 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.

    • jdthedisciple2 hours ago |parent

      How easily can I migrate from an existing sqlite-based backend?

      • Humphrey36 minutes ago |parent

        I 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.

    • parkersweban hour ago |parent

      I’ve been using on a personal side project - but found that LLMs seem to be permanently confused over how to interact with pocketbase - to the point where I’ve even tried creating a Claude Skill to try and reduce the confusion.

      Wondering if anyone else has had a similar experience?

      • input_sh11 minutes ago |parent

        From the top of https://pocketbase.io/faq/

        > If you don't have the time to at least skim through the documentation and you plan to solely rely on some AI tool, then please do NOT use PocketBase!

        It's a niche little product that's alpha-level quality, I don't know why you would expect LLMs to be good at it.

      • Humphrey31 minutes ago |parent

        Not with Pocketbase - as I haven't found I've needed to look into the docs too much. But I have come across a whole bunch of areas LLM's seem to always answer incorrectly for. For example, ChatGPT has almost never corrected told me how to use the UI in Davinci Resolve.

  • vladstudio10 minutes ago

    I see Pocketbase, I upvote!

  • 9devan hour ago

    I'd love to read the docs, but I'm still busy playing with the googly-eye-gopher on the landing page. Super cute idea.

  • olalonde2 hours ago

    For 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.

    • dotancohen2 hours ago |parent

      What 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?

      • olalondean hour ago |parent

        It 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.

        • d1sxeyesan hour ago |parent

          While 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.

      • input_shan hour ago |parent

        It'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.

  • rubenvanwyk3 hours ago

    Trailbase is the same concept, but written in Rust instead of Go.

    • odie55333 hours ago |parent

      TrailBase has a comparison page https://trailbase.io/comparison/pocketbase/

      • cyco1303 hours ago |parent

        What a respectfully and humbly written comparison page. Ditto for their Supabase comparison. I can't rate the objectivity since I know very little about TrailBase but they got my attention now. It brings me such joy to see such a writeup in a world where humility is perceived as weakness. Kudos.

        • rahulroyan hour ago |parent

          > It brings me such joy to see such a writeup in a world where humility is perceived as weakness.

          I think the trend will shift in the opposite direction with advancement of all the genAI tools.

          On a personal level, my reading time has reduced. Unless I know/respect the author, I don't bother reading genAI slop.

      • rudedogg3 hours ago |parent

        I 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_sh2 hours ago |parent

          Pocketbase's admin UI is not optimised for phones at all.

    • raybb2 hours ago |parent

      Looks pretty nice! Do I understand correctly you can have it run any JS in an endpoint too? Seems you could host your whole app with this

      https://trailbase.io/getting-started/first-ui-app/#custom-en...

  • aleda1452 hours ago

    Pocketbase is awesome. I'm using it as the auth layer for my side project (https://kavla.dev/).

    The hooks are great, even relatively complex things like spinning up infrastructure is easy (https://pocketbase.io/docs/go-event-hooks/)

  • rubenbe2 hours ago

    I'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/

  • mickael-kerjean4 hours ago

    Is this some sort of supabase but with sqlite and without the operational complexity?

    • odie55333 hours ago |parent

      Yes that is what it is.

  • matt_callmann2 hours ago

    I'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!

    • jddjan hour ago |parent

      I 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.

  • aitchnyu3 hours ago

    Whats 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.

  • EvanAnderson4 hours ago

    It got some good discussion back in January, 2024: 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).

    • input_sh2 hours ago |parent

      Been 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.

    • impure4 hours ago |parent

      I'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.

      • tommica3 hours ago |parent

        How is it in production? Does it it live up to your requirements?

        • impure3 hours ago |parent

          Yes, I use it with an RSS reader and an email app and it works great.

  • jharohit2 hours ago

    love 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)

  • wowamit3 hours 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?

    • odie55333 hours ago |parent

      It makes SQLite a service that provides you with an authenticated data access layer via a REST API. It is not a wrapper although it does use SQLite as its database.

    • RedShift13 hours ago |parent

      It creates a REST API for your SQLite database with some extras.

  • rjh29an hour 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.

    • thisgoodlifean hour ago |parent

      Even for battle-tested software like Postgresql, always read the changelog and test it thoroughly before upgrading.

  • jddjan hour ago

    We 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

  • sjdonado4 hours ago

    This is an amazing project, can't wait to see the 1.0

  • wowamit3 hours ago

    I am curious to better understand the benchmarks against simple SQLite, especially under typical load. Any level of latency will be an unnecessary overhead.

    • victorbjorklund2 hours ago |parent

      How do you use simple SQLite without any code in a webapp where the database is on the server?

      • wowamitan hour ago |parent

        You can't. I am curious if this adds another layer of latency.

  • krzykan hour ago

    I would love something similar but for frontend.

    I like developing backends, but writing JavaScript is to tiring.

    • foul16 minutes ago |parent

      In 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.

    • throwaway7738533 minutes ago |parent

      There 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.

    • andsoitis29 minutes ago |parent

      What facilities would an equivalent frontend solutuon have in your mind?

  • yungeeker2 hours ago

    This is 100% sick. Have been use this for one year.

  • zipping15493 hours ago

    Been following this for some time now and it's a real delight to use. SSE subscription is really nice.

    • tommica3 hours ago |parent

      Do you use it in small projects only?

  • ffsm83 hours ago

    Is 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

    • SerCe3 hours ago |parent

      I believe there is no contradiction with the definition from the linked article?

      > A system is said to be real-time if the total correctness of an operation depends not only upon its logical correctness, but also upon the time in which it is performed. Real-time systems, as well as their deadlines, are classified by the consequence of missing a deadline:

      > Hard – missing a deadline is a total system failure.

      > Firm – infrequent deadline misses are tolerable, but may degrade the system's quality of service. The usefulness of a result is zero after its deadline.

      > Soft – the usefulness of a result degrades after its deadline, thereby degrading the system's quality of service.

      From what I can tell, https://pocketbase.io/ attempts to be a soft-realtime system.

    • phplovesong3 hours ago |parent

      There is realtime, and there is "realtime". The other one being realtime in apps doing some sort of music thing, flight controllers etc. Then there is web "realtime" that basically only means 2sec in the past-realtime.

    • cess112 hours ago |parent

      It's common to distinguish between hard real-time and soft real-time (and sometimes firm real-time).

      This software is supposedly soft real-time, similar to what you'd expect from e.g. an Erlang system. Delayed tasks aren't considered fatal failures but overall you get a user experience close to what hard real-time systems are supposed to deliver.

    • zwnow3 hours ago |parent

      Realtime in tech is considered in timespans with short delays allowed, last time i have read about it it was like 100ms.

      • anonymousiam3 hours ago |parent

        Heh. 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.

        • JSR_FDED2 hours ago |parent

          Yeah, and I’m using Pocketbase as my game engine and it isn’t giving me 60 frames per second either.

        • zwnow3 hours ago |parent

          Well Pocketbase isnt embedded firmware.

      • foul21 minutes ago |parent

        Are you talking about (very good) webapps?

        Your average RT software has an average of 10 to 30 ms delay between operations. Performs tasks in the order of nanoseconds.

      • fragmede3 hours ago |parent

        Realtime 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.

        • zwnow3 hours ago |parent

          Even that stuff has a delay.

          • anonymousiam2 hours ago |parent

            FYI, my above referenced RTOS was for a space-based application.

  • JodieBenitez3 hours ago

    Database, admin, auth... is this some kind of Go's Django ?

    • cess112 hours ago |parent

      It's a platform similar to Supabase, Firebase and the like. I guess Heroku is also a somewhat reasonable comparison.

  • ftchd3 hours ago

    using it on mobile too

    https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pocketbase-mobile-pok/id674828...

    • rjh29an hour ago |parent

      Wow you charge a subscription for this? The Apple ecosystem is wild.

  • noodletheworld2 hours ago

    Hmmm… 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?

    • gjvcan hour ago |parent

      Hmmm… firebase clones are many and varied.

      Can you recommend any in particular, were I wanting to migrate a project from firebase?

  • postbase3 hours ago

    Congrats on the launch!

  • ranger_danger4 hours ago

    Apparently 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.

    • wowamit3 hours ago |parent

      Same here. At first, I thought it was a one-file-based database, which would have been even more commendable.

    • florians4 hours ago |parent

      Same

      • dustbunny3 hours ago |parent

        Like a single header c lib from some eastern European S tier programmer.

        • ftchd3 hours ago |parent

          tsoding mentioned

          • phplovesong3 hours ago |parent

            I really loved his ocaml days. Learnt alot. He does only C these days, but his streams are fun to watch nontheless.

  • m00dy3 hours ago

    I can vibe code this in rust in a day most

    • steve_adams_862 hours ago |parent

      This 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.

    • a9614 minutes ago |parent

      Neat. You should do a video of that and comparing the results.

    • razemio3 hours ago |parent

      No, 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.

  • postbasean hour ago

    Postbase 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.

    • andsoitis22 minutes ago |parent

      Postbase, 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.”