I have been following PocketBase since its early day - what I absolutely love about this project is how it actively tries to avoid complexity and focuses on simple yet minimalist approach. Moreover, the ease of deployment by simply uploading a single binary on the server makes it even more attractive.
After they introduced Javascript support in the backend - I feel it became a serious contender to challenge Remix, Next.js etc. frameworks.
I use PocketBase for mostly everything where I need a back end now. I came across a situation where I needed to write a custom SQL join (technically I could have just fetched all the data and done it in Node, I suppose).
I was shocked at how easy it was to write the query even inserting URL parameters and selecting based on the authenticated user only.
Fully recommend for basically everything. Great app. Not sure it would replace Next or Remix, but definitely add to the stack to simplify.
Bits and pieces. A bedtime tracking app for my kid, a microblog, a TikTok clone, a budget app, a text-to-speech app with translation functionality…
Development experience was outstanding. I primarily use SvelteKit and integrate PocketBase for SSR, so I use the SDK almost exclusively and it’s fantastic. Everything just works exactly the way you would expect.
I can’t imagine anything easier to implement, and as yet, I haven’t found any major gaps in what I can do with it, normally with OOB functionality.
Development velocity is very high and the developer is super responsive on GitHub. The documentation is very good and kept up to date pretty well.
My only real concern is that the project has a pretty poor bus factor, otherwise, I’m very impressed.
Have been using pocketbase in production for a mobile app for a couple of month now and so far it was a _very_ pleasent experience. Together with the JS SDK it is now my go to backend framework for everything where I don't need specialized libraries (like ML stuff etc.)
I've been using Pocketbase for several projects. While it's a delightful experience for solo-dev to quickly finish a project from backend to complicated frontend, I wish it has bulk-insert out of the box.
It's like saying nginx is better than superbase/firebase. Apples to oranges.
You could replicate PocketBase in Readbean, but you would have to implement from scratch:
- resources with CRUD API and real time subscriptions
- admin UI
- authz & authn system
I didn't say it's better. Why are people always misinterperting what they read (it's like you've never had text interpretation classes at school, or logic lessons to undestand how to infer implications from logical statements correctly)?
Please read again: I said it's vastly simpler (which may not be better for you!) and lighter (just measure it). The comparison is apt for me because the description "open-source backend in one file" matches both projects well and it's something I'm interested in, with readbean being far closer to my alley.
Your initial comment presents Redbean as a comparable solution, which it's not; they serve very different use cases.
Redbean requires you to write server code; Pocketbase does not. Redbean does not offer a realtime database, authentication, an admin dashboard, integrated file storage, or an inbuilt API.
I like Redbean, but it's in a completely different "market sector". It's like comparing a kit car to a luxury car: yes, they both technically serve the same purpose, but one requires much less assembly and offers a much more usable experience out of the box.
They are comparable solutions to the problem "Open-source backend in one file".
I don't care at all about "realtime database, authentication" and whatever, I care about what the title of the post says. For that purpose, Redbean is a nice alternative.
> It's like comparing a kit car to a luxury car
If all I need is a bicycle, a kit car is already over the top but will do. A luxury car makes no sense. You're thinking like everyone has the same needs that you have or something.
Ah, I see - my apologies, I think there's an unfortunate misalignment over the word "backend."
When Pocketbase is talking about a backend, they're talking about something like Firebase, which is a complete backend-as-a-service that implements everything you need for a service where the majority of the logic is in the frontend; it's meant to involve as little backend engineering as possible.
You're referring to the more general, standard sense of the word "backend". I agree with the sibling comment that you're not necessarily wrong in offering Redbean as a point of comparison, but the target user of Pocketbase has limited overlap with the targeted user of Redbean; the people looking for a Firebase-like solution would not be served by Redbean, and your initial post could be read as suggesting that they could be.
I do think the use of the word "backend" here is unfortunate, because it's really referring to something much more specific than the conventional use of the term.
I think people are being a bit harsh but your original comment (especially starting with "It seems to me" which makes it sound like a value judgment) was phrased in a way that did sound a lot like you were implying that redbean was better for the same requirements, although you didn't actually explicitly say that.
I think you would have gotten a more positive reaction if you said something like "As an alternative take on the idea of an "open-source backend in one file, redbean is a much simpler, vastly lighter one-file web server + sqlite DB: https://redbean.dev/" to make redbean isn't necessarily intended to be the same type of "open-source backend in one file"
Anyway, redbean does look really neat even if it's not necessarily totally interchangeable with pocketbase
Wanted to say thanks for the comment because TIL redbean, which in turn led me to learn about Justine Tunney, who appears to be a super-human programmer based on what I've read so far. Lots of inspirational discoveries on HN this weekend for me—Thanks ya'll!
I mostly know Python. Is there something similar in Python? Or the backend language is not relevant, because you mostly use this from JavaScript anyway?
I have been building a project https://github.com/claceio/clace which aims to make building hypermedia based web applications easier. Clace is implemented in go, it uses Starlark (python syntax subset) for application configuration. With Clace, the apps are implemented using Starlark and (go) html templates, HTMX is used for web interface, app developer does not need to write any JavaScript.
Alpine is for example, I want to show/hide a menu on mobile. I want to upload files via drag and drop. I want to have a bin icon over an image when I hover with mouse to delete it. I want to double click an input field to edit it. I want to close an overlay when I click outside of it, or when I press “esc”.
Also modals, although you can do them in htmx very nicely too, so that’s borderline.
Anything that involves network, htmx.
Things that are just frontend, Alpine suits better.
_hyperscript is basically the Alpine equivalent.
It's like the difference between Turbo and Stimulus in the Rails world
Depends on what you consider minimal, but I enjoy working with PocketBase and VanJS[1]. However there is no component library built in (if this is what you were asking for).
If you want a front-end for a single-page webapp, I loved Svelte. It puts all the HTML, JavaScript/TypeScript, and CSS together in the same place. The tutorial is delightful.
BUT, if you need a multi-page webapp, SvelteKit is complicated and not well documented.
More than one server. Sqlite should be thread safe and simple services can scale to thousands of parallal users. If you are OK with some downtime every 6 months when server goes down it will scale well. Deploy/ rollback will be an effort.
I'm in this situation right now. How would one go about solving this?
To keep this simple, I'm thinking exporting just the necessary data from each db and inserting that to a stats db (having a source column to each table, referring to the original db). Then load the stats db with Metabase or something.
Migrations on the stats db may be a bit of a pain, as well as making sure that all data is exported and imported correctly every time.
Gotcha. And that makes sense for the purpose of the project. Should one have multiple instances of sqlite dbs, what strategies exist to keep them synced?
Are you a developer? Because it seems to be geared towards developers. It's something like a all-in-one backend that you can use as a starting point and extend if needed.
Personally, I think the website is clear and concise. Doesn't even have any marketing filler which is a huge plus in my corner.
It's like a smaller Supabase, which was an open source alternative of Firebase. So basically a database, authentication, file storage, and backend in one solution.
It is a simple program that (1) hosts a webserver, (2) runs server-side code, and (3) hosts a database. It also has built-in support for logging in and permissions to data.
Thus, if you want to write a simple website that needs permissions, storage, and server-side code, it's a great backend solution. The limitation is that it isn't high performance.
Been using Pocketbase for almost all of my projects lately. Its realtime database is especially nice to introduce multiplayer functionality with relative ease.
It plus SvelteKit has been a dream to get up and running using the JS SDK.
For CRUD apps, sveltekits progressive enhancement and form actions make it quick to to add simple function to the page. You can store the pocketbase instance, pb, in locals and reference it all over the application.
For more multiplayer things, sticking a client-side subscription to a collection allows updates of elements that can be worked with/added/moved around etc.
TypeScript is support on the frontend for oldtimers like me who have used plain JS for far too long and refuse to accept the torture of unnecessarily untyped languages any longer.
Also as already mentioned by others there exist web APIs.
It is great to see the number of good opensource projects in this area. Grist and NocoDB deserve mentions, although more targeted towards database management. It is also amazing that they provide so simple ways to get started (single file/electron)
I've been using Pocketbase in production for a few months now, with alpinejs on the front end.
The development philosophy is on point. It's genuinely pleasant, pragmatic software which serves a real purpose and it improves weekly without feature creep.
I watch the discussions and issues slowly getting more tiresome as it becomes more mainstream and worry that he'll burn out trying to keep up with the level of support he's offered until now.
I would very strongly encourage anyone using this to generate income to support the project on open collective.
Pocketbase is amazing! So far I had a great experience using it as a backend/database for the app I'm building where I'm using React with Vite for the frontend. I'm using it mainly for auth and for keeping track of paid and free accounts. Some things that I found rather useful:
- It's super easy to host. I was initially thinking of using Appwrite or Supabase but found it a tricky to self-host them, especially Supabase. I could spin up Appwrite quickly via CapRover, but found it an overkill for what I needed.
- View collections [1] make it easy to return just a subset of the data that you need. In my case I'm using a view collection as a join for users and paid_users collections, where I just return their paid through date.
- The fact that you can extend it with Go or JS [2] should make it possible to completely skip having a backend, at least if your needs aren't very complex.
I definitely plan to continue using it for some smaller/side projects. Currently I'm thinking of trying to use it as CMS for an Astro blog and in the future as backend for some browser extensions.
I feel like super easy to host needs to be re-emphasized. We're talking about dropping a single binary into your server and you're off to the races. If only more things were so simple.
The key distinction here seems to be that it uses an in-core database (SQLite), whereas a Go project may depend on an out-of-core database like Postgres, which would then also have to be deployed.
For many projects (especially hobby projects where downtime is tolerable), the former is probably quite sufficient.
Not really because then projects started needing multiple containers and orchestration, and might be fussy about the order the different services come up.
I've skimmed at the docs, and it's not clear to me how it would deal with:
* Something like row-level access control, so that people can only access the data in tables that belong to them (say clients can only view their own purchases, and also not modify them after they checked them out).
* Integration with the rest of the world, e.g. sending email, acting on triggers, etc.
* Something like CSV export/import.
* Internationalization.
Would that all be possible? Straightforward? Do those all require extending (with go or js)?
The first point (authn) is inherent to the unextended framework via filter rules.
Most of the remainder requires extension other than authz emails, but extension at its simplest just means adding a plain old JavaScript function to run on a record lifecycle event of some kind - typically [before/after] [insert/update/delete] of <record>. Various GO APIs are exposed to the JavaScript runtime for doing filesystem, cryptography, http, email, etc work.
Re internationalization, I think you're right. I don't have experience building app/websites, a fortiori with internationalization, so I threw this question in with the lot!
There’s something to be said about drastically reducing your threat surface too. Locking down 1 server is easier than locking down a fleet. You can still have security in depth inside your server.
It can be the backend itself if you just need auth (both authentication and authorization) and your SQL tables to be a REST API. This often suits frontend single page applications in JS/TS and Pocketbase also provides a JS SDK to ease this (with realtime updates). It's a similar model to Firebase but without the lock-in.
However if you want to write more logic you can also import Pocketbase as a library and extend it with hooks, custom endpoints etc. all written in Go.
Edit: Added more info about using Pocketbase with a JS SPA frontend.
You would use it instead of things like Supabase and Appwrite. It gives you a server, a db and easy authentication, authorization with real-time queries like firebase.
Maybe it's not for me, I really don't know what that means. If it only describes itself as "a replacement for <name>" I feel like I'm not the target at all.
I feel like this will be super interesting when pairing with static site generator such as eleventy. Using static site generator is sometimes difficult because of lacking a web backend and ghost is too heavy for me.
Could you explain a bit more this setup? I have been looking for a way to have a tool to fill pages for a static site generator that's local and then just git push in a simplified way.
The idea is to create a website for my mother, without having to deal with hosting at all (static github pages).
It is simple, so its single program is (1) a webserver, (2) runs server-side code, and (3) hosts a DB. I'm running a $12-per-month server on Vultr and its only service is PocketBase.
You don't need to host the webpages on PocketBase. If you wanted all your webpages to be on Github Pages, you could do that.
You won’t need to really run server all the time, you can run locally and use it as a lightweight CMS, and run only when you need to edit and generating anything. You can choose to only upload the generated HTML files to GitHub.
See my explanation on my reply to the original post.
Some static site generators have good support for generating pages from a dynamic source, say API, database or anything you can access using programming language.
See eleventy, for instance, has the “Javascript data files” [1], it run some JS code to generate a list of posts, here we can fetch from pocketbase, then, we can generate pages dynamically [2].
Pocketbase in this case just act as a lightweight CMS.
150 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 204 ms ] threadAfter they introduced Javascript support in the backend - I feel it became a serious contender to challenge Remix, Next.js etc. frameworks.
Looking forward to v1
I was shocked at how easy it was to write the query even inserting URL parameters and selecting based on the authenticated user only.
Fully recommend for basically everything. Great app. Not sure it would replace Next or Remix, but definitely add to the stack to simplify.
I'm curious to know what kind of projects did you build using PB and how was your development experience?
Development experience was outstanding. I primarily use SvelteKit and integrate PocketBase for SSR, so I use the SDK almost exclusively and it’s fantastic. Everything just works exactly the way you would expect.
I can’t imagine anything easier to implement, and as yet, I haven’t found any major gaps in what I can do with it, normally with OOB functionality.
Development velocity is very high and the developer is super responsive on GitHub. The documentation is very good and kept up to date pretty well.
My only real concern is that the project has a pretty poor bus factor, otherwise, I’m very impressed.
Sounds refreshing.
As a bonus, the same file runs on basically any OS without any dependencies on the local system, not even libc.
Redbean doesn't have authentication or the client SDKs at least.
You could replicate PocketBase in Readbean, but you would have to implement from scratch: - resources with CRUD API and real time subscriptions - admin UI - authz & authn system
Redbean requires you to write server code; Pocketbase does not. Redbean does not offer a realtime database, authentication, an admin dashboard, integrated file storage, or an inbuilt API.
I like Redbean, but it's in a completely different "market sector". It's like comparing a kit car to a luxury car: yes, they both technically serve the same purpose, but one requires much less assembly and offers a much more usable experience out of the box.
> It's like comparing a kit car to a luxury car
If all I need is a bicycle, a kit car is already over the top but will do. A luxury car makes no sense. You're thinking like everyone has the same needs that you have or something.
When Pocketbase is talking about a backend, they're talking about something like Firebase, which is a complete backend-as-a-service that implements everything you need for a service where the majority of the logic is in the frontend; it's meant to involve as little backend engineering as possible.
You're referring to the more general, standard sense of the word "backend". I agree with the sibling comment that you're not necessarily wrong in offering Redbean as a point of comparison, but the target user of Pocketbase has limited overlap with the targeted user of Redbean; the people looking for a Firebase-like solution would not be served by Redbean, and your initial post could be read as suggesting that they could be.
I do think the use of the word "backend" here is unfortunate, because it's really referring to something much more specific than the conventional use of the term.
I think you would have gotten a more positive reaction if you said something like "As an alternative take on the idea of an "open-source backend in one file, redbean is a much simpler, vastly lighter one-file web server + sqlite DB: https://redbean.dev/" to make redbean isn't necessarily intended to be the same type of "open-source backend in one file"
Anyway, redbean does look really neat even if it's not necessarily totally interchangeable with pocketbase
- htmx (https://htmx.org/)
- Alpine.js (https://alpinejs.dev/)
both are minimal and very easy to get started.
Alpine is for example, I want to show/hide a menu on mobile. I want to upload files via drag and drop. I want to have a bin icon over an image when I hover with mouse to delete it. I want to double click an input field to edit it. I want to close an overlay when I click outside of it, or when I press “esc”.
Also modals, although you can do them in htmx very nicely too, so that’s borderline.
Anything that involves network, htmx. Things that are just frontend, Alpine suits better.
_hyperscript is basically the Alpine equivalent.
It's like the difference between Turbo and Stimulus in the Rails world
https://hypermedia.systems/client-side-scripting/
[1]: https://vanjs.org/
BUT, if you need a multi-page webapp, SvelteKit is complicated and not well documented.
To keep this simple, I'm thinking exporting just the necessary data from each db and inserting that to a stats db (having a source column to each table, referring to the original db). Then load the stats db with Metabase or something.
Migrations on the stats db may be a bit of a pain, as well as making sure that all data is exported and imported correctly every time.
I'm sure there are better ideas.
https://litestream.io/
Really nice, looks like something I'd love to work with someday!
Personally, I think the website is clear and concise. Doesn't even have any marketing filler which is a huge plus in my corner.
Thus, if you want to write a simple website that needs permissions, storage, and server-side code, it's a great backend solution. The limitation is that it isn't high performance.
It plus SvelteKit has been a dream to get up and running using the JS SDK.
For CRUD apps, sveltekits progressive enhancement and form actions make it quick to to add simple function to the page. You can store the pocketbase instance, pb, in locals and reference it all over the application.
For more multiplayer things, sticking a client-side subscription to a collection allows updates of elements that can be worked with/added/moved around etc.
Also as already mentioned by others there exist web APIs.
- https://github.com/gristlabs
- https://nocodb.com/
The development philosophy is on point. It's genuinely pleasant, pragmatic software which serves a real purpose and it improves weekly without feature creep.
I watch the discussions and issues slowly getting more tiresome as it becomes more mainstream and worry that he'll burn out trying to keep up with the level of support he's offered until now.
I would very strongly encourage anyone using this to generate income to support the project on open collective.
This logic could have been put within pocketbase as well, but the body of work they depend on was already .net.
Other than that it's just little JavaScript callbacks in the back and typescript in the front.
There isn't much missing that you truly need to bolt things on for, provided SQLite is appropriate for your usecase.
- It's super easy to host. I was initially thinking of using Appwrite or Supabase but found it a tricky to self-host them, especially Supabase. I could spin up Appwrite quickly via CapRover, but found it an overkill for what I needed.
- View collections [1] make it easy to return just a subset of the data that you need. In my case I'm using a view collection as a join for users and paid_users collections, where I just return their paid through date.
- The fact that you can extend it with Go or JS [2] should make it possible to completely skip having a backend, at least if your needs aren't very complex.
I definitely plan to continue using it for some smaller/side projects. Currently I'm thinking of trying to use it as CMS for an Astro blog and in the future as backend for some browser extensions.
[1] - https://pocketbase.io/docs/collections/#view-collection
[2] - https://pocketbase.io/docs/use-as-framework/
For many projects (especially hobby projects where downtime is tolerable), the former is probably quite sufficient.
* Something like row-level access control, so that people can only access the data in tables that belong to them (say clients can only view their own purchases, and also not modify them after they checked them out).
* Integration with the rest of the world, e.g. sending email, acting on triggers, etc.
* Something like CSV export/import.
* Internationalization.
Would that all be possible? Straightforward? Do those all require extending (with go or js)?
Looks like a nice tool.
API Rules https://pocketbase.io/docs/api-rules-and-filters/#api-rules
Hooks https://pocketbase.io/docs/js-overview/
Admin panel has backups for data, and import/export of collections schema
Most of the remainder requires extension other than authz emails, but extension at its simplest just means adding a plain old JavaScript function to run on a record lifecycle event of some kind - typically [before/after] [insert/update/delete] of <record>. Various GO APIs are exposed to the JavaScript runtime for doing filesystem, cryptography, http, email, etc work.
For i18n you have templates and a database.
As someone else mentioned, API rules can control access to rows.
It can send emails. Set timers. And send its own requests to other webservers. (I haven't used any of these features.) https://pocketbase.io/docs/js-sending-emails/
I had to write my own CSV importer. (I'm hoping to open-source it.)
As for internationalization, what specific features did you want? That seems more like a front-end feature.
Having the auth, db and file server in the same service.. an attacker doesn't even need lateral traversal or privilege escalation once inside..
I am building something similar but at a lower level and based on PostgreSQL.
https://github.com/sted/smoothdb
It aims to be compatible with the PostgREST API.
Or is it actually the backend, e.g. the frontend (browser) talks to it directly?
However if you want to write more logic you can also import Pocketbase as a library and extend it with hooks, custom endpoints etc. all written in Go.
Edit: Added more info about using Pocketbase with a JS SPA frontend.
The idea is to create a website for my mother, without having to deal with hosting at all (static github pages).
Does this combination work that way?
It is simple, so its single program is (1) a webserver, (2) runs server-side code, and (3) hosts a DB. I'm running a $12-per-month server on Vultr and its only service is PocketBase.
You don't need to host the webpages on PocketBase. If you wanted all your webpages to be on Github Pages, you could do that.
See my explanation on my reply to the original post.
Some static site generators have good support for generating pages from a dynamic source, say API, database or anything you can access using programming language.
See eleventy, for instance, has the “Javascript data files” [1], it run some JS code to generate a list of posts, here we can fetch from pocketbase, then, we can generate pages dynamically [2].
Pocketbase in this case just act as a lightweight CMS.
Is this what you’re talking about?
[1]: https://www.11ty.dev/docs/data-js/
[2]: https://www.11ty.dev/docs/pages-from-data/