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Comment by simonw

2 years ago

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.

    • Hmm... kind of. It's pretty substantially different from Firebase which is defacto NoSQL versus Pocketbase which uses SQL.

      Given that it's based on SQLite I'd be very interested to know how well this would work as a true backend for a multiuser site that allows users to interact/post/etc.