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supabase
realtime
Elixir2019–2025
supabase / realtime

realtime

Broadcast, Presence, and Postgres Changes via WebSockets

Data & DatabasesSystems & InfrastructureNetworking
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
27Distinct people
56Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
7.7KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

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What it is

Broadcast, Presence, and Postgres Changes via WebSockets

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

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Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 4:00:59 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year56 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2019-10-25 11:52:44 UTC to 2025-11-17 11:38:53 UTC.

0510152019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 15 mentions; 1 submissions, 14 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 14 mentions; 1 submissions, 13 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 11 mentions; 1 submissions, 10 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 1 submissions, 4 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC15114
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC14113
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC11110
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC514
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202

What Hacker News says

14 sources
cpursley·Dec 18, 2021
I like Supabase's approach over pub/sub. One of the big advantages is they listen to the Postgres WAL which overcomes the 8000 bytes limitation[1] of the notify approach. And Elixir is especially well suited for this type of workload. I actually extracted out much of the Supabase Realtime library so that I could work with the data directly in Elixir[2] [1]: https://github.com/supabase/realtime#why-not-just-use-postgr... [2]: https://github.com/cpursley/walex
In Postgres is a great pub/sub and job server (2019)
cpursley·Dec 1, 2021
I actually extracted out the WAL listening bit of code from Supabase and use that to listen to changes in Postgres then do callback style business logic in Elixir. If you like Elixir, this could be an option. I haven't had time to work on it myself until recently, but I brought up the idea of making that bit a separate library (and I understand that the Supabase folks are super busy). https://github.com/supabase/realtime/issues/146#issue-874855...
In Realtime Postgres Row Level Security
kiwicopple·Dec 1, 2021
Hey HN, Supabase is an open source Firebase alternative. We're building the features of Firebase using enterprise-grade open source tools. We're particularly focused on scalability. We take proven tools like Postgres, and we make them as easy to use as Firebase. Today, Supabase is adding Row Level Security (RLS) to our Realtime engine. The linked blog post goes into depth around the technical implementation, so I’ll just give a recap for the people who jump straight to comments (like me). Supabase was launched here on HN when we open sourced our Realtime engine[0] - an Elixir server which clients (i.e. website visitors/users) can connect to via websockets and receive a stream of PostgreSQL changes. The server receives those changes via a logical replication slot - the same system that PostgreSQL uses for replicating to other databases. To
Read the rest
achieve RLS we added a few SQL functions, the main one is apply_rls[1] which the stream is filtered through. For every user connected to the Elixir server, the Postgres function checks if they have access to the database change and appends an array of allowed user IDs. The Realtime server then delivers the change to the user only if the connected user is matched in this array. This one has been a long time coming, and it's one of the reasons why we have maintained our "beta" badge for so long. A few of the team will be here to answer any questions - my cofounder @awalias and @steve-chavez from PostgREST, @inian, @wenbo and @1_over_n [0] Realtime Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22114560) [1] SQL function: https://github.com/supabase/realtime/blob/master/server/priv...
In Realtime Postgres Row Level Security
thruflo22·Apr 23, 2021
Supabase’s realtime library consumes the logical WAL and provides a Phoenix channel + JavaScript API to subscribe to matching events from it: https://github.com/supabase/realtime Under the hood, the core implementation was copied (with credit / attribution) from: https://github.com/cainophile/cainophile I happened to do a similar thing but I adapted cainophile into an Elixir “OffBroadway” producer: https://github.com/integratedb/integrate/blob/main/lib/integ... These approaches rely on acking the WAL to confirm data has been processed. It’s simpler than running Debezium / Kafka for “zookept” CDC. However, they are “at least once” at best and it’s easy to shoot yourself in the foot so think twice before relying on this kind of thing for a real application. Materialize is nice — TAIL is a lovely abstraction and their data ingest uses Debezi
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um under the hood. That said, I believe their Postgres binlog source is still alpha / under active community dev.
In Ask HN: Is there a way to efficiently subscribe to an SQL query for changes?
kiwicopple·Mar 30, 2021
Supabase started because we open sourced a "change data capture" server on top of Postgres[0]. We then chatted developers to see if they wanted to use it. In our conversations, many of the developers were using Firebase because it was "just easier" to get started. We really like Postgres, so we decided to make it as easy to get started as Firebase. We aren't modifying Postgres, or trying to turn it into something proprietary. We want migration to/from to a simple pgdump wherever possible. We provide some tooling around it to make it a better experience (for example, auto-generated APIs using PostgREST). [0] https://github.com/supabase/realtime
In Storage is now available in Supabase (YC S20)
kiwicopple·Mar 30, 2021
Hey HN, Supabase is an open source Firebase alternative. We're building the features of Firebase using enterprise-grade open source tools. We're particularly focused on scalability. We take proven tools like Postgres, and we make them as easy to use as Firebase. Today Supabase is releasing Storage. This is our second launch of Launch Week[1]. The linked blog post goes into depth around the technical implementation, so I’ll just give a recap for the people who jump straight to comments (like me). Backend: We are using S3 as a File store. Since most storage platforms have an S3-compatible API, this made the most sense. We will add more providers (like Backblaze) in the future. Middleware: This is the key part. We assessed a lot of tools including Ceph, Swift, Minio and Zenko. These are all awesome, but they aren’t tightly integrated with Po
Read the rest
stgres. The tooling in Supabase is centered around Postgres: the APIs use PostgREST[2], the Realtime engine hooks into Postgres’ WAL[3] and we use GoTrue[4] + Postgres Row Level Security[5] for Auth. Since we already use RLS for Auth, we decided to leverage the same functionality for managing access to Files. We created an API [6] which wraps everything up into a nice interface. This obviously goes against our philosophy of “support existing tools” - the linked blog post describes our rationale more thoroughly. Future: This is very much an “alpha” release of Storage. We have a lot of great features planned for a CDN, automatic resizing, optimizations, and since it’s using Postgres there potentially are a few neat things we can do with Full Text Search and Data Loading. A few of the team will be here to answer any questions - my cofounder @awalias and @steve-chavez from PostgREST, @inian, and @1_over_n [1] Launch week: https://supabase.io/new/blog/2021/03/25/launch-week [2] PostgREST: http://postgrest.org/ [3] Realtime: https://github.com/supabase/realtime [4] GoTrue: https://github.com/supabase/supabase/tree/master/docker [5] RLS: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/ddl-rowsecurity.html [6] Storage API: https://github.com/supabase/storage-api
In Storage is now available in Supabase (YC S20)
kiwicopple·Mar 27, 2021
Thanks for the kind words. > attempt to integrate deno for Postgres This is a (public) exploration. It looks like it's possible, but it doesn't provide much benefit over sending a payload to a serverless function, which can be in any language, not just JS. So we decided we'd deliver serverless function support first, utilising our Realtime server: https://github.com/supabase/realtime
In Angels of Supabase
btown·Feb 23, 2021
For realtime requirements, I'm keeping a close eye on Supabase, which is building an open-source realtime Firebase-style API on top of the Postgres WAL. Theoretically, it's just Postgres with a bunch of services on top, so if you bring your own database migration and fixtures system, you could run a copy locally. Not sure that tooling is fully there yet (and it could use some of the model-layer bells and whistles I remember from the days when Meteor was the way you'd go for realtime), but the dev experience is very promising: https://github.com/supabase/realtime/blob/master/examples/ne... https://github.com/supabase/supabase
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