August 2022 Summaries

During Launch Week 5, a significant number of features were shipped, but the highlight was reviewing the submissions from the Launch Week 5 Hackathon, which received an impressive 46 projects, making it the most popular hackathon yet. The winners of the Supabase Launch Week 5 Hackathon have been announced, with notable projects such as Supabase Cache Helpers, Hop - A Tinder-like job board app, Otentik Authenticator, That Hot Dog Game, Quid Faciam Hodie?, With RepoWatch, and Cowofi showcasing their technical skills. The winners will receive limited edition golden or silver Supabase caps, and the community is invited to join a Twitter Space with the winners on August 30th to celebrate the hackathon's success. The event also provides an opportunity for participants to connect with others in the Supabase community and build new projects together.

In this tutorial, we built a real-world Angular application using Supabase as our backend service. We created an app that closely resembles Trello, allowing users to create boards, lists, and cards in real time. The main features of the app include: 1. Creating and managing boards with titles and deletion functionality. 2. Adding, updating, and deleting lists within a board. 3. Adding, updating, and deleting cards within a list. 4. Inviting users to collaborate on a board by entering their email addresses. 5. Real-time updates for all changes made to the app's data. To achieve this, we utilized Supabase's real-time features, which allowed us to listen for changes in our database tables and update the application's state accordingly. We also implemented various forms of input validation and error handling throughout the project. The final code for this tutorial can be found on Github, where you can easily set up your own Supabase instance and create the necessary tables using the provided SQL file. This app serves as a great starting point for building more complex applications with Angular and Supabase in the future.

Today, Supabase released pg_jsonschema, a Postgres extension that adds JSON Schema validation support for json and jsonb data types. This extension allows developers to enforce constraints on document data types in SQL databases, similar to those applied by relational databases. The extension offers two functions: json_matches_schema() and jsonb_matches_schema(), which can validate a json or jsonb instance against a JSON Schema. By using these functions in combination with check constraints, developers can ensure that their data models are well-specified while still taking advantage of the flexibility offered by document data types.

Supabase is an open-source platform that combines existing tools with its own contributions to provide a developer-friendly experience. Launch Week 5 highlighted the diverse communities and contributors within the Supabase ecosystem, showcasing their work and celebrating everyone who contributes time to the Supabase mission. The week featured new features, courses, tutorials, integrations, expert partners, and developer stories. A virtual Hackathon was also held throughout Launch Week with a $1500 GitHub sponsorship awarded for the best overall project.

Supabase has announced several updates during Launch Week, including Supabase Vault, a Postgres extension for managing secrets and encryption inside databases; Auth UI, which allows users to create their own themes and use custom labels; Dashboard permissions, enabling role assignment and restriction of team actions; JSON schema validation with pg_jsonschema; an updated version of pg_graphql with support for json/jsonb types, in filter, and introspection for larger schemas; and early-access signups for Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for Supabase Auth.

The newly released PostgREST v10 automatically turns a PostgreSQL database into a RESTful API, offering several new features including EXPLAIN, which provides execution plans for requests through HTTP or supabase-js, enabling quicker feedback on query performance. Additionally, one-to-one relationships are now automatically detected to avoid unnecessary JSON arrays in query results. Computed relationships have also been introduced, allowing users to define custom SQL functions and override detected relationships. However, a breaking change has been made regarding many-to-many relationships, requiring primary key columns to include foreign key columns of the many-to-many ends for join tables to be correctly detected. These features are part of PostgREST's efforts towards extensibility and customization.

Supabase Vault is a Postgres extension that allows users to store and manage sensitive information, such as API keys and access tokens, in a secure manner. The core of the Vault is a table with metadata and an encrypted text column where secrets can be stored. A unique root key is pre-generated and managed by the pgsodium library, which provides an Encryption and Key Derivation API. This allows users to store sensitive information without exposing raw encryption keys, making it easier to manage key management tasks. The Vault uses Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data, ensuring that associated data is authentic when reading secrets. It can be used for storing reasonable amounts of secure data, but may not be sufficient for storing large amounts of sensitive information like PII.

Supabase has announced the general availability of its Realtime multiplayer features, Broadcast and Presence. These features are now available for all active Supabase projects on the Free Plan and all new Supabase projects created from August 18th. The company will work with other projects to migrate to the new Realtime over the next few weeks. Chris McCord, creator of Phoenix Framework, has joined as a technical advisor.

Supabase has achieved SOC2 Type 1 compliance, which evaluates companies on five Trust Services Criteria: security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. The company underwent a rigorous process to get certified, including choosing a compliance monitoring tool, Vanta, and selecting an auditor. The audit verified that Supabase was adhering to its stated policies at the time of the audit, but also highlighted the importance of ongoing security measures. The certification is not just about passing a test, but about implementing security practices that improve security or risk threshold in a meaningful way. Supabase used the SOC2 process to codify its existing security practices and will continue to work on improving its security posture, including obtaining HIPAA certification and rolling out security improvements for all projects hosted on the Supabase Cloud offering.

Supabase has released a new version of its JavaScript library, supabase-js v2, which focuses on improving the developer experience and addressing common pain points. The release includes type support, new Auth methods, data methods that return minimal by default, async Auth overhaul, scoped constructor config, better errors, improvements for Edge Functions, and a sneak peek at multiplayer features. Supabase-js v2 is the result of contributions from over 100 contributors to its libraries and over 450 contributors to its documentation and websites.

The Supabase CLI v1 is being moved out of beta, offering improved database migration management and TypeScript type generation capabilities. A Management API (in beta) has also been released, allowing users to manage organizations, projects, Edge Functions, and more through a REST API. The new features enhance the CLI's functionality, enabling users to automate migrations, tests, and deployments using GitHub Actions and CI/CD pipelines. Additionally, a tool called migra is introduced for improved schema diff-ing and manual migration scripts. Users can now generate TypeScript types and explore the Management API, which opens up opportunities for integrations with other tools like Zapier, Terraform, and Pulumi.

Supabase has raised $80 million in its Series B funding round, bringing its total funding to $116 million, with the support of investors such as Felicis, Coatue, Lightspeed, and Square Peg Capital. The company aims to hold itself accountable for the promises made during its Series A funding round by revisiting its plans for growth and community engagement. Since its Series A announcement a year ago, Supabase has grown significantly, with over 150,000 PostgreSQL databases launched, more than 110,000 developers signed up, and a growing community on Discord, Twitter, GitHub Stars, and other platforms. The company is committed to giving back to the open-source ecosystem through initiatives such as its open collective, which has paid over $80,000 to contributors and maintainers. Supabase is also investing in new technologies, including PostgREST, Elixir Type support, Deno, and database encryption, with a focus on supporting existing open-source tools before developing its own products. The company is now moving into Phase 3 of its growth plan, which includes branching, scalable storage, distributed databases, ephemeral compute, snapshots, and time-travel. Supabase has also invested $500,000 in OrioleDB, a PostgreSQL extension that aims to unlock new capabilities in Postgres.

The Supabase Open Source Hackathon, starting on August 12th and lasting for 10 days, offers a $1500 GitHub sponsorship and gold Supabase caps as prizes. Participants can build any project, app, tool, or library using Supabase-js v2.0 and Flutter SDK v1.0, with extra credit given to those who use these tools in their projects. The hackathon has five prize categories: Best Overall Project, Most Visually Pleasing, Most Technically Impressive, Most Fun/Interesting, and Best Flutter Project. Submissions are due by August 21st, and the Supabase Founders will judge entries based on creativity, functionality, visual appeal, technical impressiveness, use of Supabase features, and fun factor.

Supabase is a platform-as-a-service built on top of PostgreSQL and other open-source tools, allowing users to create data-intensive apps and tooling. To get started with Supabase, you need to install the Python SDK, Slack's Python SDK, and add API keys from your Supabase dashboard. You can then create a bot in Slack and connect it to Supabase using the `SUPABASE_URL` and `SUPABASE_KEY` environment variables. The bot will post messages on specific channels based on predefined rules. To set up the environment file, you need to copy the bot and person API tokens from your Slack dashboard. Once everything is set up, the bot runs an infinite loop looking for new data and performing tasks, including checking for new channels every hour.

Launch Week is back from August 15-19, featuring product announcements and fun activities. Supabase has released Flutter SDK 1.0 developer preview, Auth Helpers with SvelteKit support, pg_jsonschema for JSON validation in Postgres, and hCaptcha integration. Community updates include webinars, tutorials, and projects made with Supabase. The company is hiring and encourages users to follow them on social media platforms.

The developer preview version of Supabase Flutter SDK v1.0 is now available for download, offering improved developer experiences through several key updates including automatically handling auth state persistence and deep links, throwing errors instead of returning them, removing the need for `.execute()` to get data, and introducing desktop support for deeplinks. The update also includes plans for multiplayer support, a Supabase Auth UI library, and bug fixes across the entire library, made possible by contributions from the open source community.