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Pocketbase – open-source realtime back end in 1 file

pocketbase.io

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Re: Pocketbase – open-source realtime back end in 1 file

#171

Post by davidron »

leo_e wrote: post #147

The "SQLite doesn't scale" argument is usually just premature optimization masquerading as architectural wisdom. Unless you are actively hitting WAL contention limits (which is surprisingly hard to do on modern NVMe), the operational simplicity of a single binary beats the "scalability" of a distributed mess any day. We’ve normalized a complexity tax where every side project "needs" a dedicated DB cluster and a Redis…

The bottleneck of most applications is acquiring enough users to hit a technical bottleneck.

Re: Pocketbase – open-source realtime back end in 1 file

#172

Post by F7F7F7 »

Bombthecat wrote: post #155
mrbluecoat wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!"

Yap, not famous enough to train AI on it

It’s getting better on Claude specifically now that training cutoffs are starting to move beyond the end of 2023.

OpenAI models are a little less likely to trip up as long as you keep reminding it that it needs to account for v0.23+

Re: Pocketbase – open-source realtime back end in 1 file

#173

Post by F7F7F7 »

8cvor6j844qw_d6 wrote: post #158
olav wrote: post #75

I love it and use it for personal projects and internal tools. I tend to combine it with https://pocketpages.dev/ which gives me file-based routing and nice templates. Ah, and Pocketbase has automatic database migrations, so all schema modifications can go into version control. I even hacked a Gemini protocol server into it, so that I can browse my personal knowledge graph using Lagrange.

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?

I’m probably not the right person for this but it’s perfect for home use. There’s a few OSS homelab dashboards build exactly for this type of thing. I run a Home Assistant one.

Re: Pocketbase – open-source realtime back end in 1 file

#174

Post by F7F7F7 »

ezst wrote: post #121
d1sxeyes wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While that may be true, it is worth seriously checking the docs and working out what requirements you have or might have. Pocketbase does an awesome job of providing extensibility, likely most of the stuff you want that’s not fully out of the box can be added in 20 lines of code or so.

So, that sits firmly where Django/Rails are at, except that you use a GUI rather than code to define the models? I suppose that lowers the bar ever so slightly, because any management rule or business logic is still deferred to a proper framework/programming language. Seems very niche and limiting, all things considered.

It’s niche and limiting in the same way that Supabase and Firebase are niche and limiting.

Re: Pocketbase – open-source realtime back end in 1 file

#175

Post by rudedogg »

trailbase wrote: post #100
rudedogg wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate their honesty. After a quick look I’d give another point to Pocketbase for it’s admin UI. The TrailBase one is pretty sloppy (on mobile at least), and looks like it’s using bootstrap. Pocketbase has a sense of quality/care around it that seems missing.

You won't get any argument here. PocketBase's is very polished and friendly. I fell back onto a popular pre-existing UI component system called shadcn (which does look a bit like bootstrap), not only because you gotta start somewhere but also because I'm not the caliber of UX designer Gani is :bow:. If you have the time, I would appreciate any feedback on how to improve. I'm a bit surprised on the mobile comment, sin…

> Could you elaborate? - thanks

The part that prompted my comment was clicking to edit a row on mobile in vertical orientation. Rather than fill the screen the edit shows up in a modal which doesn't really make sense, since you have so little horizontal space to work with. And the inputs are cut off slightly due to no padding.

And the whole admin UI overfills my (pro max) iPhone when held vertically, I think due to the navbar icons? Anyway, it'd be nice to not have to horizontally scroll to see those 40px or w/e everywhere. It makes it so you have to horizontally scroll to see or evaluate every page

One other little nice thing you could do if you wanted is prefill the username/password with the demo user.

---

Very cool project, and it's cool to see how Rust benefits the performance.

Re: Pocketbase – open-source realtime back end in 1 file

#176

Post by mike_d »

burky wrote: post #167
denismenace wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally the lack of a decimal type make SQLite a no-go for me. Its too much of a hassle to do financial operations completely on the application side.

This and DATETIME. The workarounds for these are mostly fine if you’re just using SQLite as a key value store, but doing translations in SQL queries for these workarounds sounds atrocious.

90% of people aren't using "SQL" anyway. They are just doing basic CRUD operations on a data store with SQL syntax, usually abstracted through an ORM. The only reason they want a SQL database in the first place is for ACID.

If you find yourself caring about data types or actually writing a query, you should probably setup an actual database server.

Re: Pocketbase – open-source realtime back end in 1 file

#177

Post by rekttrader »

8cvor6j844qw_d6 wrote: post #158
olav wrote: post #75

I love it and use it for personal projects and internal tools. I tend to combine it with https://pocketpages.dev/ which gives me file-based routing and nice templates. Ah, and Pocketbase has automatic database migrations, so all schema modifications can go into version control. I even hacked a Gemini protocol server into it, so that I can browse my personal knowledge graph using Lagrange.

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?

It’s a lot lighter than Postgres/supabase. I run it on a pi-5 and it works perfectly well.

Re: Pocketbase – open-source realtime back end in 1 file

#178

Post by catketch »

p2detar wrote: post #96
parkersweb wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tried to use LLMs to help me with server-side pb coding, but it was mostly a flop. LLMs don't have an up-to-date state of pb's API. 2 out of 3 times the LLM would give at least a hint how to go about something and the rest is me manually editing the code, reading the docs or looking at pb's source code. All in all, I consider it a nice "pair-programming" type of experience but one can't rely on LLMs to do the pb wo…

This is what worked for me… clone the pb repo and stick reference to it in my agents.md. I put additional notes in my own addendum.md in the line cloned repo. ChatGPT-codex variants handle it nearly flawlessly and no issues with being out of date. I use the same pattern for all “niche” libraries

Re: Pocketbase – open-source realtime back end in 1 file

#179

Post by Natfan »

trailbase wrote: post #100
rudedogg wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate their honesty. After a quick look I’d give another point to Pocketbase for it’s admin UI. The TrailBase one is pretty sloppy (on mobile at least), and looks like it’s using bootstrap. Pocketbase has a sense of quality/care around it that seems missing.

You won't get any argument here. PocketBase's is very polished and friendly. I fell back onto a popular pre-existing UI component system called shadcn (which does look a bit like bootstrap), not only because you gotta start somewhere but also because I'm not the caliber of UX designer Gani is :bow:. If you have the time, I would appreciate any feedback on how to improve. I'm a bit surprised on the mobile comment, sin…

fyi, shadcn can be styled/themed in any way you like!

Re: Pocketbase – open-source realtime back end in 1 file

#180

Post by Humphrey »

vunderba wrote: post #146
rubenvanwyk wrote: post #9

Trailbase is the same concept, but written in Rust instead of Go.

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.

Ho do you find Trailbase compares? Worth the switch?
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