PocketBase self-hosted Firebase alternative

2023-03-06 275 words 2 minutes

Contents

What is PocketBase

PocketBase is an open source backend made in go consisting of embedded database (SQLite) with realtime subscriptions, built-in auth management, convenient dashboard UI and simple REST-ish API.

Install PocketBase

The first thing that you will have to do is head to https://pocketbase.io and select the file for your operating system. Since I am using linux I will show how to set this up on linux but it should be pretty similar for any other os.

Unzip the file and open up a terminal to the path that you extracted the file to and type:

./pocketbase serve

If you want to serve some static content you can create a new directory called pb_public

mkdir pb_public

Then paste any content into that directory

eg.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
    <title>Epic Website</title>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>My epic website</h1>
</body>
</html>

And save that as index.html inside of the pb_public folder

Now if you head to http://127.0.0.1:8090/ you should see the website that we entered above.

If you go to http://127.0.0.1:8090/_/ it will take you to an admin portal. There you should create a account. After you have setted up your account you should see something like this.

Here you can add and create users

And also create custom collections eg

If you click on the settings icon you can see that you will be able to add applications, mail settings, file storage (s3) , export/import collections, add or remove auth providers, token options and add/remove admins.

That’s it for now if you want to learn more check out https://pocketbase.io/docs/

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