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> nothing a skilled dev can't work around.

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!"

This was my exact comment, thanks.

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

what sort of prod apps are you running from it? keen to learn by what other people are doing

May I know how's Pocketbase performance demand? I am thinking of hosting it on a Raspberry Pi 5 at home. Any limitations you find unusual/notable compared to standard Supabase?

What is Lagrange? I couldn’t find any project in the context of LLM or knowledge graph.

What does it actually do? Yes, I know what a backend is - and the backends I write have hundreds to thousands of lines of code that do very specific things. How can that be eliminated? What types of applications can be built with these tools?

Looking at the examples on the front page it reminds me even more about Parse.

Django has great GIS integration. How does Pocketbase compare here ? Also, can Pocketbase work with PostgreSQL or is it SQLite only ?

How easily can I migrate from an existing sqlite-based backend?

I’ve been using on a personal side project - but found that LLMs seem to be permanently confused over how to interact with pocketbase - to the point where I’ve even tried creating a Claude Skill to try and reduce the confusion.

Wondering if anyone else has had a similar experience?

I read their webpage instead of the first page of documentation and got a pretty good idea of what it was, perhaps their documentation is too in the weeds for the overview you’re looking for?

Personally I’d describe it as an alternative to firebase, if you’re familiar with that.

It's the first thing on the linked page:

Realtime database Authentication File storage Admin dashboard

TrailBase has a comparison page https://trailbase.io/comparison/pocketbase/

I started with Pocketbase but the limitation around not supporting NULLABLE columns despite being based on SQLITE was starting to become a bit of a liability, so I switched to Trailbase a little while ago.

Trailbase won my heart by not leaving out curl-commands in their examples :)

Looks pretty nice! Do I understand correctly you can have it run any JS in an endpoint too? Seems you could host your whole app with this

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

Another selling point for Pocketbase then.

Sorry if my question is misguided: did you try SQLite3's native online backup API? I would not use raw file access knowing they have that.

Love seeing the love for SQLite. Personally, I've had a great experience with litestream, which will continuously replicate any changes. Are you using https://sqlite.org/rsync.html?

What are the differences between sqlrsync and litestream?

I am so confused about this message

Sounds like an sqllite performance tuning issue than anything else.

Yes that is what it is.

I agree but I’ve never been sure what that version of the product looks like then.

Been using it for about a year now, but not in a way it's "intended to be". I wrote some scripts that add data to it and then I have a (static) website that pulls data from it and builds pages. So, for me it's more of a REST API and a web interface in front of sqlite than a proper auth provider (at least for now).

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.

I've been using it for a while. There was only one release that required manual migrations. I think 0.23.0 and apparently the dev is backporting security updates for those who haven't upgraded.

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.

It makes SQLite a service that provides you with an authenticated data access layer via a REST API. It is not a wrapper although it does use SQLite as its database.

It creates a REST API for your SQLite database with some extras.

What kind of app do you use it for?

I can speak to this.

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.

Wow you charge a subscription for this? The Apple ecosystem is wild.

How do you use simple SQLite without any code in a webapp where the database is on the server?

There are so, so many frameworks that it can be overwhelming to find a good fit, but give htmx or svelte a try, they often come up as great ways to simplify JS. I'd steer clear of NextJS. Maybe even React, as they have become convoluted messes over time that rarely offer much benefit, unless you are on a big team and working on a huge, complex code base. Though job prospects are better for those frameworks. If you use AI in your workflow, however, due to the huge amount of public knowledge available, React and NextJS can become easier to work with. Be wary of the sometimes extreme breaking changes introduced quite suddenly however.

In the last years a market for "no code" software has sprawled, just etch the interface on a tables SPA, plug Okta, plug your backend or Firebase to their apis and you should be set.

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.

What facilities would an equivalent frontend solutuon have in your mind?

Even for battle-tested software like Postgresql, always read the changelog and test it thoroughly before upgrading.

Do you use it in small projects only?

I believe there is no contradiction with the definition from the linked article?

> 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.

There is realtime, and there is "realtime". The other one being realtime in apps doing some sort of music thing, flight controllers etc. Then there is web "realtime" that basically only means 2sec in the past-realtime.

It's common to distinguish between hard real-time and soft real-time (and sometimes firm real-time).

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.

Realtime in tech is considered in timespans with short delays allowed, last time i have read about it it was like 100ms.

It's a platform similar to Supabase, Firebase and the like. I guess Heroku is also a somewhat reasonable comparison.

Have you ever seriously looked into self-hosting Supabase?

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.

Self-hosted Supabase is pretty good. I don't think anyone argues with that. It didn't used to be as smooth and it's certainly hungrier with many more moving parts.

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.

Hmmm… firebase clones are many and varied.

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

Same here. At first, I thought it was a one-file-based database, which would have been even more commendable.

Same

eh? what launch? been using it for years now, it's brilliant

This project is so well thought out, you couldn't vibe code it in a week or a month. Genuinely, it's quite a wonderfully designed piece of software. It seems simple at a glance, but what makes it so good is almost intangible; it's a joy to use not only because of what it is, but what it isn't as well. And I really believe that's not something you can achieve with vibes in such short order.

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.

No, simple answer. Try it, link to the repo and I will tell you all the placed it failed. Vibe coding has its places. For something like pocketbase it most definitely is not ready yet.

Neat. You should do a video of that and comparing the results.

Postbase, in contrast to PocketBase, doesn’t seem ready for primetime : ” Brand new project launched 02 Nov 2025, this is boiler plate but working! Expect heavy changes coming every few hours until stable

Mostly all code is ChatGPT generated but manually tested by human.”