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walrus
PLpgSQL2021–2026
supabase / walrus

walrus

Applying RLS to PostgreSQL WAL

5Distinct people
7Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
142GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

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What it is

Applying RLS to PostgreSQL WAL

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

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Also in these discussions

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 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 year7 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2021-09-30 13:40:41 UTC to 2026-06-28 09:35:18 UTC.

01232021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20232024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

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

View mention counts and date ranges
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PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

7 sources
I've always known that you run vanilla PostgREST, and that it evaluates RLS in-pg, and it all works great. However when I first looked at walrus[0] a while back (18 months ago?), I couldn't quite figure out what the mechanism of action was, i.e. whether the RLS rules were being evaluated in the database or being parsed in from the DDL and then (partially?) reinterpreted by your WAL subscriber. I hope that explains my comment. I've had another brief look at that repo, and either you've clarified a few things since I last looked at it, or I didn't look at it closely enough in the first place. It makes far more sense to me now, the impersonation + re-query mechanism puts me at 100%. Thanks for the response, I appreciate it. [0]: https://github.com/supabase/walrus
In A Poor Man's API
wenbo·Apr 11, 2022Submission

Show HN: Multiplayer Demo Built with Elixir

Hey HN, I’m an engineer at Supabase [0] and one of the creators of this demo. My team and I have been working hard to bring developers the next version of Supabase Realtime. The current version of Realtime [1] is a Change Data Capture (CDC) server for a PostgreSQL database that broadcasts changes via WebSockets to authorized subscribers. It’s written in Elixir/Phoenix. The server utilizes PostgreSQL’s logical replication functionality, which writes database changes to Write-Ahead Logging (WAL) segment files, and a replication slot, responsible for managing and retaining WAL files. Database changes are polled from WAL by the server using PostgreSQL’s replication function pg_logical_slot_get_changes and changes converted to JSON objects using the wal2json [2] extension by setting it as the output plugin. Security is enforced through two che
Read the rest
cks - each check ensures only authorized client subscribers are sent database changes. The first check validates a JWT that is sent by clients subscribing to database changes. This JWT must contain an existing database role and optional claims, both of which can be referenced in Row Level Security (RLS) policies. Every valid client subscription is then inserted into the realtime.subscription table with an assigned UUID, database role, and claims. The second check calls the realtime.apply_rls SQL function from Write Ahead Log Realtime Unified Security (WALRUS) utility lib [3]. This function takes the database changes, executes a prepared statement to verify if the database role and claims have SELECT permissions on the changes, and outputs an array of authorized UUIDs. Then, the server finds all the subscribers whose UUIDs are in that array and broadcasts the changes to them. The next version of Supabase Realtime will offer three features: Broadcast, Presence, and Extensions. Broadcast, our Pub/Sub offering, can be used to pass ephemeral data from client to client such as cursor movements. This runs on a distributed cluster of nodes built on top of Phoenix PubSub + Channels. Presence, can be used for tracking online/offline users and their state. This is built into Phoenix, and uses replicated state across a cluster using an Observe-Remove-Set-Without-Tombstones (ORSWOT) CRDT [4] which prefers adds over removes when resolving conflicts. Extensions, are a way for the community to add additional functionality to take advantage of the WebSocket infrastructure. We have converted the existing Change Data Capture system to an extension that supports connecting to multiple customer databases (multi-tenancy). Other possible extensions include listening to other databases like MySQL and getting stock market events server-side [5], then broadcasting them to connected clients. This demo is built using a Supabase project, Supabase Realtime, and Next.js and deployed on 20 Fly [6] nodes located around the world. You can find an introduction and walkthrough of the demo here [5]. Supabase Realtime is entirely open source and you can find the demo code here [7]. Once we have stabilized the release we will add it to the self-hosted offering [8]. This demo is a way to highlight the upcoming features and gather feedback/ideas. Feel free to ask me anything and let me know what you think! [0] https://supabase.com [1] https://github.com/supabase/realtime [2] https://github.com/eulerto/wal2json [3] https://github.com/supabase/walrus [4] https://gsd.di.uminho.pt/members/cbm/ps/delta-crdt-draft16ma... [5] https://supabase.com/blog/2022/04/01/supabase-realtime-with-... [6] https://fly.io [7] https://github.com/supabase/realtime/tree/multiplayer [8] https://github.com/supabase/supabase/tree/master/docker
221 points · Open discussion
> does this also work for tables where the GRANT hides certain columns from different users? Yes, it does! Any columns that are not selectable by the user's role are hidden from the JSON `response` and `old_response` keys and are not allowed for user defined filtered. Here is where the columns are checked to see if they are selectable https://github.com/supabase/walrus/blob/f030688d9d94520b916d... And here is there they are filtered out https://github.com/supabase/walrus/blob/f030688d9d94520b916d...
In Realtime Postgres Row Level Security

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