Silvestriblog
Aug 132 min read

I'm falling in love with Supabase

My journey with Supabase: from curiosity to enthusiasm. Exploring how this PostgreSQL-based platform streamlines authentication, database management, and development for bootstrapped projects.

Title. I'm fairly new to the whole React/NextJS/Vercel stack, and before using PostgreSQL, I had only extensively used MySQL and MongoDB (for a single project). I discovered Supabase during one of my many sessions on X, as it seemed like a lot of people were speaking very positively about it.

At the time, what immediately struck me was their clean and essential website design — I couldn’t figure out much about what it was and how I could use it. But now that I'm using it proactively for a super secret project (👀) I'm working on, I'm thinking that it's really the perfect tool for any bootstrapped project, particularly in its initial phase.

Setting up the authentication is a breeze. The Supabase package for Next does it all. All I had to do was add the users to the app and customise the login/registration page designs a little bit, and that's it.

Database -wise... well, I'm no PostgreSQL expert, but having a strong MySQL background certainly helps. I appreciate the ease of their GUI, which allows me to set access policies for each table, so I can be confident that only authorised users will be allowed to perform certain operations.

There are still so many functions I haven't discovered yet. I've only started using their CLI today (I was still working with a testing environment on a remote database, potentially destined for production), but thankfully, the experience has been pretty smooth with the database migrations, as I've already explored them extensively in my previous experience with PHP and Laravel. So it took me just a couple of hours to get everything sorted and have the two separate environments ready. I can only imagine that for my next project, it’s going to take something like 20 minutes worst-case scenario, which is impressive.

All in all, I'm very impressed by the capabilities of this Firebase alternative, and I'm really looking forward to discovering what else I can do with it!