Pocketbase – Open-Source Realtime Back End in 1 File

I use Go so all I have to do is `go get -u` and `go mod tidy` and then it's upgraded. It works great.

My biggest gripe with it by far is that the web interface is not phone-optimised at all, which prevents me from quickly correcting a field or two when I'm not behind a computer. For my use case, that happens at least once a week. Another gripe I have is that the search bar in the admin interface could be far more powerful than it currently is. Anything more complex than searching my records by exactly one field and I'm better off writing one-off scripts to do so than by using the web interface.

Good things: the control it gives me over which fields get exposed publicly, ability to resize images (instead of slowing down my build by doing so from the frontend), overall stability (never had it go down unexpectedly), S3-compatible storage, automated backups.

To give some sense of scale, ~10k records scattered across 30 or so tables (or collections as they call it), most with some attachments, and plenty of one-to-one and one-to-many relations between the tables. The database itself is only a couple of megabytes in size, but the whole backup (attachments included) is nearing 3 gigabytes now.

While updates happen pretty frequently, they don't change the parts I actually use, so I can't say I ever struggled with keeping up to date.

https://trailbase.io/getting-started/first-ui-app/#custom-en...

> A system is said to be real-time if the total correctness of an operation depends not only upon its logical correctness, but also upon the time in which it is performed. Real-time systems, as well as their deadlines, are classified by the consequence of missing a deadline:

> Hard – missing a deadline is a total system failure. > Firm – infrequent deadline misses are tolerable, but may degrade the system's quality of service. The usefulness of a result is zero after its deadline. > Soft – the usefulness of a result degrades after its deadline, thereby degrading the system's quality of service.

From what I can tell, https://pocketbase.io/ attempts to be a soft-realtime system.

This software is supposedly soft real-time, similar to what you'd expect from e.g. an Erlang system. Delayed tasks aren't considered fatal failures but overall you get a user experience close to what hard real-time systems are supposed to deliver.

Kind of like people said they could write airbnb or dropbox's software in a weekend. Sure, you can approximate it, but there's a bit of soul and momentum and history there that makes it more than a repository of code and gives it a unique capacity and potential all its own.

Wondering if anyone else has had a similar experience?

Also, you can do programmatic setup of tables with migrations: https://pocketbase.io/docs/go-migrations/ (also available in JS). I can't remember if pocketbase will automatically write migrations to disk for you or if there's a flag you need to turn on, but you can generate those migrations on a local instance, commit them to VCS, deploy them somewhere, and either run a command to run the migrations or turn on auto-migrate (which does what you'd expect).

Can you recommend any in particular, were I wanting to migrate a project from firebase?

Could you elaborate a bit more on your scaling concerns? You can certainly have lock-congestion with SQLite. That, said Postgres - while awesome - isn't the most horizontally scalable beast.

One binary to manage one sqlite file is indeed quite a selling point in comparison to this: https://github.com/supabase/supabase/blob/master/docker/dock...

Not saying Supabase is bad at all at what it does and I am very glad that it exists as an open source project, but they don't target the same type of project complexity at all.

It works, though if you need auth/authz you'll probably want to add some middleware to get a cookie flow working instead of the jwt approach PB uses by default.

If I remember right, essentially you set the cookie on login and on auth refresh and pull it out and into the auth header on all incoming requests.

You can also find dozens of drag n drop builders and block editors working for modern frontend dev, there are a lot for React for example, just vibe code the components.

It is a very good piece of work, and extensible with JS (I just tried that). I have a fear about the future because the dev is alone, and responds alone in the discussions. He is also quite, how to say, "rough" in the interactions, which I can completely understand, being the one pulled around by everyone.

This is a very, very good piece of work when you need to decorrelate the back from the front

Agreed. Loved this FAQ notice:

"If you don't have the time to at least skim through the documentation and you plan to solely rely on some AI tool, then please do NOT use PocketBase!"