websockproxy VS postgres-wasm

Running Postgres in a browser is great, but connecting to it with PgAdmin is even better. Unfortunately browsers block TCP network access to the VM. To circumvent this, we proxy the traffic through websockets. We run a fork of Websockproxy which allows the emulator to talk to the internet by converting data sent over a websocket port into TCP packets. Our fork of Websockproxy adds the ability to tunnel into the Postgres server.

No, it runs on an x86 hardware emulator on the browser (js + wasm). The Arch image was from the Qemu disk converted to a 9p filesystem. the networking using tun/tap over WebSocket https://github.com/benjamincburns/websockproxy

Also: https://github.com/copy/v86 - more productized browser x86 runtime, used by eg https://github.com/snaplet/postgres-wasm

> forcing SQLite

It might be the case that it's running SQLite via wasm. If so, then other database engines would need to be runnable in a browser too.

PostgreSQL has been shown to work in the browser (eg https://www.crunchydata.com/blog/learn-postgres-at-the-playg..., and also https://github.com/snaplet/postgres-wasm), so that might be an option.

Not sure about others.

Thanks, I've been looking at WASM, for ex https://github.com/snaplet/postgres-wasm/tree/main/packages/... , it would certainly simplify everything to "download a fat file".

Hey! Peter from Snaplet here. This is really exciting stuff. We created the OSS postgres-wasm (https://github.com/snaplet/postgres-wasm) example a few weeks ago. An idea I'm playing around with is something like:

  1. Visit https://postgresql.com/try?version=14.x

Other in-memory alternatives for PostgreSQL embedded-postgres (I haven't tried it yet) postgres-wasm (currently it only runs in the browser).

"/s" is obsolete as of now: https://github.com/snaplet/postgres-wasm I'm so sorry

Today we're open sourcing postgres-wasm with our friends at Snaplet.

Peter from Snaplet here. A month ago I saw the CrunchyData post and wanted to play around with the code that made it happen, it wasn't OSS so I asked for help:

> If anyone out there wants to work on an open source version of this full-time please reach out to me. [0]

Paul reached out and we started working on it almost immediately. Check out the repo here: https://github.com/snaplet/postgres-wasm

We have a blog post about some of the interesting technical challenges that we faced whilst building this: https://www.snaplet.dev/post/postgresql-in-the-browser

Like most things, this is built on-top of the amazing open-source projects that made this possible, but special mention goes to v86.js and buildroot. We just glued it together.

---

[0] Request for collaboration: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32500526