Comment by Fire-Dragon-DoL

2 years ago

I'm not sure I understand what exactly is. I like the tips, but I don't understand: is it an app that I can run on my local machine?

It's a binary called "pocketbase" that you can download and run on your machine. When you run it, it starts a localhost web server. That server includes a web based UI tool that lets you create "collections" (effectively database tables) and insert/update/delete data in them.

More importantly, it provides a JSON API (and a client library) for interacting with those collections.

  • But people build apps on top of it and deploy it to the cloud, too, right? Does it then compete with stuff like AWS RDS?

    • I think it's more like a self-hosted Firebase - you run it on a server (with a disk drive that can persist the data) to get a hosted API for your apps to talk to.

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If you have ever built a web app backend that consists of a database, a REST API for that database, and a web admin interface to the database - well, this gives you all of that for free, just by running an executable.

  • Ok so essentially an easy to host activeadmin (rails library). I think the single executable that runs on every os makes it very interesting for usecases where data is generated into a static site