postgrest VS Keycloak

hey hn, supabase ceo her

we just announced GA, after ~4 years of beta. for those who don't know: supabase is a postgres hosting company. we also host other open source "backend" tools that make it easy to get started with postgres (tools like PostgREST for auto-generate APIs [0])

we owe a lot to the HN community. you launched us 4 years ago [1], when we were just a few developers. since then HN has been a staple in our journey, one of the best sources of product feedback [2]

the GA badge is mostly to signify organizational readiness. we're at a stage where we can take any profile of customer. we have a support team that works 24/7, and a success team that will help customers improve their postgres usage. we released our Index Advisor [3] yesterday, and we'll be releasing a few more products this week that helps customer with performance and security.

on a personal note: i read HN most days, and love going through the ShowHN's to see what devs are building. thanks for being an awesome community and my favorite place to lurk on the internet. i'll stick around to answer any questions

[0] PostgREST: https://postgrest.org

[1] Launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23319901

[2] HN journey: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[3] Index Advisor: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40028111

If you use PostgreSQL and are proficient with using its row-level security feature, you can choose from several tools/services built above RLS, including Supabase, PostgREST, and PostGraphile. They all provide a way to expose database CRUD as a web API, assuming you've configured the RLS rules to properly secure the access.

wget 'https://github.com/PostgREST/postgrest/releases/download/v11.2.0/postgrest-v11.2.0-linux-static-x64.tar.xz'

SupaBase is entirely based upon PostgREST. In fact, PostgREST is arguably 49% of their value proposition according to their own website. The other 49% is PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL of course is a super mature database, and some would argue the best RDBMS on the planet, so let's ignore that part for a moment, and consider it a mature thing and move on to PostgREST.

You don't need this PHP snippet:

To get the same functionality without the extra step, simply use PostgREST [1]

[1] https://postgrest.org/

PostgREST is a standalone web server that turns your PostgreSQL database into a RESTful API using the database's structural constraints and permissions to define the API's endpoints and operations. In this tutorial, you will create a simple note-taking app by leveraging PostgREST to construct a RESTful API for the app and using htmx to deliver HTML content.

You might find some info in the docs of PostgREST [1] or in the previous discussions on HN about it [2].

For the versioning, I just have a git repo where I keep every role, schema, table, view, function, trigger, etc. definitions. Every time I change something in the database I first change it in the git repo too to have an history.

[1] https://postgrest.org

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=postgrest

Don't know if you would call this a "program" but PostgREST is written is Haskell too.

https://github.com/PostgREST/postgrest

In this article we'll be using Keycloak to quickly augment an application with user management and SSO. We will demonstrate the integration by securing a page for logged-in users. This quickly provides a jump-off point to more complex integrations.

Keycloak, an open-source identity and access management solution, provides robust authentication and authorization services for modern applications. However, configuring Keycloak instances manually can be tedious and error-prone. In this blog post, we'll explore how to simplify Keycloak configuration using Terraform and Terragrunt, enabling infrastructure as code (IaC) practices for managing Keycloak realms, clients, users, and more.

In this article we'll be using Keycloak to secure a Vue.js Web application. We're going to leverage oidc-client-ts to integrate OIDC authentication with the Vue app. The oidc-client-ts package is a well-maintained and used library. It provides a lot of utilities for building out a fully production app.

Keycloak has been a leader in the Identity and Access Management world since its launch almost 8 years ago. It is an open-source offering under the stewardship of Red Hat

It sounds like what you're looking for is an identity provider.

A popular open source option is https://www.keycloak.org/

This application can manage your users, then you can use standards like OpenID or SAML to plug it into your application, of which there are usually many plugins to accomplish this depending on your tech stack.

KeyCloak is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project that offers enterprise IAM solutions. Keycloak emphasizes proficient enterprise authorization solutions by providing:

Outline only uses SSO for authentication. The solution when self hosting is use a private keycloak server [1]. This allows you to do email based auth.

[1] https://www.keycloak.org/

> Keycloak was good but has too much legacy for 10+ years.

I got curious, actually seems to check out and explains why it's so well documented (but also complex and oftentimes confusing):

> The first production release of Keycloak was in September 2014, with development having started about a year earlier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keycloak

https://github.com/keycloak/keycloak/releases/tag/1.0.0.Fina...

> Don't outsource either your authentication or authorization. Run it in-house.

This is hard to do, though. I hope people here will drop a lot of combinations that work for them!

Personally, for a small/medium scale project, I went with:

Keycloak: https://www.keycloak.org/

It supports various backing RDBMSes (like PostgreSQL, MariaDB/MySQL and others), allows both users that you persist in your own DB, as well as various external sources, like social login across various platforms, is an absolute pain to configure and sometimes acts in stupid ways behind a reverse proxy, but has most of the features that you might ever want, which sadly comes coupled with some complexity and an enterprise feeling.

I quite like that it offers the login/registration views that you need with redirects, as well as user management, storing roles/permissions and other custom attributes. It's on par with what you'd expect and should serve you nicely.

mod_auth_openidc: https://github.com/OpenIDC/mod_auth_openidc

This one's a certified OpenID Connect Relying Party implementation for... Apache2/httpd.

Some might worry about the performance and there are other options out there (like a module for OpenResty, which is built on top of Nginx), but when coupled with mod_md Apache makes for a great reverse proxy/ingress for my personal needs.

The benefit here is that I don't need 10 different implementations for each service/back end language that's used, I can outsource the heavy lifting to mod_auth_openidc (protected paths, needed roles/permissions, redirect URLs, token renewal and other things) and just read a few trusted headers behind the reverse proxy if further checks are needed, which is easy in all technologies.

That said, the configuration there is also hard and annoying to do, as is working with OpenID Connect in general, even though you can kind of understand why that complexity is inherent. Here's a link with some certified implementations, by the way: https://openid.net/developers/certified-openid-connect-imple...