postgres-websockets VS pocketbase

At work, we've finally replaced a large part of a custom (mostly-)web backend with PostgREST recently, and that's quite a relief: considerably less code to maintain in that project now, and that was a rather awkward code. Something akin to PostgREST's "Embedding with Top-level Filtering" [1] had to be provided for all the tables, with OpenAPI schema and a typed API (Haskell + Servant); I avoided manually writing it all down, but at the cost of poking framework internals, and maintainability suffered. It was particularly annoying that the code doesn't really do anything useful, except for standing between a database and an HTTP client, and simply mimics the database anyway. Whenever a change had to be introduced, it was introduced into the database, the backend, and the frontend simultaneously, so it wasn't even useful for some kind of compatibility.

Now PostgREST handles all that, and only a few less trivial endpoints are handled by a custom backend (including streaming, which I'm considering replacing with postgrest-websocket [2] at some point).

During the switch to PostgREST, the encountered minor issues were those with inherited tables (had to set a bunch of computed/virtual columns [3] in order to "embed" those), and with a bug on filtering using such relations (turned out it was an already-fixed regression [4], so an update helped). Also a couple of helper stored procedures (to use via /rpc/) for updates in multiple tables at once (many-to-many relationships, to edit entities along with their relationships, using fewer requests) were added (though the old custom backend didn't have that), the security policies were set from the beginning, the frontend was rewritten (which allowed to finally switch without adding more work), so it was only left to cleanup the backend.

Not using views, since as mentioned above, database changes usually correspond to frontend changes, and the API doesn't have to be that stable yet.

Happy with it so far.

[1] https://postgrest.org/en/stable/api.html#embedding-with-top-...

[2] https://github.com/diogob/postgres-websockets

[3] https://postgrest.org/en/stable/api.html#computed-virtual-co...

[4] https://github.com/PostgREST/postgrest/issues/2530

It's an obvious question, but have you looked into Pocketbase?

https://github.com/pocketbase/pocketbase

I'd like to plug PocketBase [0] for a similar use case.

Last week I was looking for a place to store random data with API access, and was looking at making a Google Sheets backend, but PocketBase was easy and didn't have a 60 rpm quota.

Deploying to a cheap VPS was very easy with CapRover.

[0] https://pocketbase.io/

What is Pocketbase? Pocketbase is an open-source backend solution offering a real-time database, file storage, and seamless user authentication with OAuth integration, all readily available right out of the box.

Browsing HN, GitHub and the like we get to see a huge variety of software products and code bases.

I often see products and think - if this product X, got together with Y, it would be pretty cool - kind of like if they had a kid together.

Not too literally, but more on the conceptual level - my level of programming is low.

E.g. Just some....

- pocketable.io & datasette (+with some more charting) [https://pocketbase.io, https://datasette.io]

I'm working on a personal project and found myself looking for an alternative to Postman/Insomnia this morning. This made me realize i've been using the same tools for so long for work (mobile development, finance) that this project may be a good time to try out some new things.

Here are a few tools that i've been using lately that I really enjoy:

https://pocketbase.io/ - A dead-simple self-hosted firebase/supabase-like "backend in a box" using golang and sqlite. So far i've been really impressed. I've gone the route of extending the base offering with more go code and am really enjoying the experience.

https://excalidraw.com/ - An open source whiteboarding tool. Slick to use and after learning some keybinds I've gotten pretty fast at throwing together diagrams to explain things to people on my team. The killer piece though is that the filetype is just json, so I can source control my diagrams. Even better, their "export to png" function has a box to embed the json data _into_ the png, allowing me to slap the diagram in places that only accept images (think confluence) and still be able to change the diagram later if needed. 10/10.

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/ - Gitlab's CI/CD toolset is really impressive, and I've gotten really intimate with it's deeper features over the past year. I'd be curious though to hear from someone who's familiar with it vs it's competitors.

Is there an article somewhere, outside of the Pocketbase docs, presenting that pattern?

- https://github.com/pocketbase/pocketbase/blob/master/core/ap...