Comment by christyjacob4 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by christyjacob4 | Hacker News Reader

Over the past few months we’ve been trying hard to make Appwrite as simple to setup and use as possible. Your candid feedback has been crucial in shaping the project and it would be great if you can share some features you’d like to see in the project going forward.

What is Appwrite ? In simplest terms, Appwrite is an open source Backend As A Service (aka BaaS). Appwrite is an all in one solution with all the essentials you need like Authentication, User Management, Realtime Databases, Webhooks, Storage, Cloud Functions, SDKs for your favourite language and it’s light weight. Appwrite even runs on a Raspberry Pi. Most importantly, Appwrite is self-hosted which means you own your data and prevent any vendor lock-ins.

Talking about Appwrite’s features - Realtime Databases and events ( Recent benchmarks have showed a single server handling 1M+ concurrent connections )

- SDKs for iOS, Android, Flutter, Web ( React, Angular, Vue, Svelte etc.) Python, PHP, Node, Deno, Kotlin and more

- Bring your own Database - Use your choice of SQL or MySQL databases ( MariaDB, MySQL, MongoDB and more )

- Database permissions for finer tuned access control

- Storage API with built in encryption, compression and antivirus

- Bring your own Storage - Use your choice of the local filesystem, DigitalOcean Spaces, S3 or an any other storage provider of your choice

- Cloud functions with support for over 20 runtimes

- Webhooks to connect with 3rd party APIs and services

- User Management and Authentication

- Multiple authentication methods - email, 25+ OAuth providers, JWT, API Keys

- Completely stateless and extensible architecture allowing easy integration with your existing backend

- A Dashboard, CLI and VSCode extensions to manage your server and many more...

I was about to throw in the towel after evaluating Firebase / Supabase last week for a new project I'm working on and revert back to good o'l Laravel, but Appwrite looks very interesting and could potentially solve my problem so I'll definitely check it out!

Just one question: is there also Postgres support?

Not yet, but it's coming soon. Appwrite is not coupled to any database or other under the hood technology.

I’m curious why Supabase didn’t suit your needs, especially since you’re looking for Postgres support?

(Disclosure: supabase ceo)

Hi, when are Supabase Functions expected to be released?

I'm quickly reaching a point in my project where direct DB calls don't cut it and I don't want to muck about with PG functions especially since I'm familiar with other programming languages. :(

Some suggestions: Using Supabase took me 5x the amount of time it should have taken me, honestly. 1. There needs to be more official snippets, PG especially. Create view, modify table, change constraints, and so on. If I'm your target demographic, it pays to watch issues raised/FAQs and integrate it in the UI. For example, I'm not very familiar with SQL and PG features. I had to learn the hard way that RLS does not apply to views. Basic for someone who knows DBs? Maybe. But I'm someone who wants to ship my product and my expertise is elsewhere. Would have loved to see this info in the UI.

2. Some things are just so hard to find! I spent a lot of time looking for something so simple. I think it was views? And also something under user authentication, I don't remember. Maybe you would benefit from user research - get a dev who hasn't used Supabase before, watch them build something with this and then address pain points.

Thanks for the feedback. Extra snippets are a great idea, especially with Row Level Security which is a bit harder to google for.

> when are Supabase Functions expected to be released?

We’re doing another Launch Week starting on Monday next week. You will enjoy Thursday’s launch

Supabase Functions launching Thursday, March 31st, 2022!

I learned so much about postgresql and RLS from postgraphile starter project: https://github.com/graphile/starter/blob/main/%40app/db/migr...

also the project is worth checking out ;)

For me, if I want to move quickly, there's just so many great example React + Firebase projects out there. It's so easy to get started, even if I would prefer to work with postgres over nosql. I could have just missed it in the docs or elsewhere, but I couldn't seem to find a really easy to follow todo or chat app or something like that. I created a database I think and then just had little idea how I'd tie it all together with my front-end. So I went back to firebase for an MVP.

Thanks for the feedback. We have these -

Examples: https://supabase.com/docs/guides/examples

React: https://supabase.com/docs/guides/with-react

Is this the type of thing you’re looking for? Perhaps they could be more prominent

Basically the lack of cloud functions (need a place somewhere to run my backend code ) and the Hook Events being in alpha. I know you're working on it but for my project these features are critical.

When Supabase Functions are live and Hooks are stable then it will definitely work for the app I'm working on.

Got it! Make sure to tune in for next-week's Launch Week

You might be interested in what we're building with http://nhost.io. We have serverless functions available together with event triggers (hooks) on database events using Postgres and Hasura (GraphQL).

(Disclosure CEO of Nhost)

https://appwrite.io/docs/installation

https://appwrite.io/docs/production

I would really love to see something like this in the supabase docs. They are currently lacking a little bit for running a self hosted supabase instance for production.

thanks for the feedback - you're right, the appwrite docs here are very nice!

I'll spend some time today improving our self-hosting docs (https://supabase.com/docs/guides/hosting/overview)

Thanks! We're going to be deploying Supabase on prem soon using Kubernetes. (We could probably contribute a Helm chart if you wanted.)

We're also happy paying customers! We need on prem to offer our own customers an on-prem solution.

We always welcome contributions, but of course - no obligation

I was trying Supabase on a toy project in Elm, ran into a weird CORS error. Even in React when using supabase-js the api call works, but using `fetch` (copied from chrome dev console) in dev console fails with CORS error. Supabase-js does something, which is not visible in the dev console.

Asked on Discord on two different channels after googling it for a while, no response whatsoever.

Supabase seems like a fine project, but without someone answering these kind of queries it's impossible to use.

> Supabase-js does something, which is not visible in the dev console

the JS client doesn't do anything special - it just makes a Fetch request to a URL.

You can find the cURL request inside your custom docs (inside the dashboard). Under the hood we use PostgREST: https://postgrest.org

Just curious, did you try Hasura too?

Wow, that's an impressive set of features! I remember kicking the tires on the service a year ago and liked it but didn't have a big need for it. It looks like a lot of great stuff has been added in the time since then.

Thank you so much! We've been working very hard the last year, and looking back - yeh we did add a lot of stuff :)

I put this on Supabase's launch post too, but would you consider supporting a more traditional compute model? i.e. the ability to run an always-on docker container that runs a web server or similar (similar to dokku or heroku). I realise functions are the new hotness, but as far as I can see for non hobby projects they mainly have downsides any very little upside.

From their readme it looks like you can host it however you want:

> Appwrite backend server is designed to run in a container environment. Running your server is as easy as running one command from your terminal. You can either run Appwrite on your localhost using docker-compose or on any other container orchestration tool like Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, or Rancher.

Hmm... I think I'm not quite the target market. For me the whole point of a tool like this is that I don't need to worry about maintaining this kind of thing. All the guff around auth and functions is just stuff I have to put up with to get that hosted niceness.

There's two ways to address this if you don't wanna maintain/host.

There will be a hosted Appwrite Cloud option => https://appwrite.io/cloud

There is a way to do 1 click deployment on Digital Ocean Marketplace: https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/appwrite

With these options, you can put off the whole mess with devops, infra, and hosting to someone else :')

Yes, this is something we would consider in the long run. Functions are great, but not for every use case.

Thank you so much for Appwrite! The community on Discord is very helpful and the self hosting guide is great. Very unlike my terrible experience with Supabase who seem to do their best to cripple the self hosted option

I was hoping someone here would compare the two. I might have to give Appwrite a try after all. Supabase's self-hosted option was wack when I tried it a few months ago.

Our self-hosted solution was designed to be easy to setup in both development and production. I hope you'll enjoy our single command installation.

Also, self-hosting is at the core of what we do and once our cloud solution is out, we don't plan to add weird disabilities to it.

My honest two cents, which is biased, so take liberal amounts of salt.

I think Supabase is verbose. You get to dig around the PostgreSQL instance, write SQL, etc. I know people that live and die by SQL, so if that sounds like you, Supabase is great.

Appwrite is more about simplicity. Our SDKs are simple, our UI is simple, our Documentation is simple, heck we even have a 1 line deploy: docker run -it --rm \ --volume /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \ --volume "$(pwd)"/appwrite:/usr/src/code/appwrite:rw \ --entrypoint="install" \ appwrite/appwrite:latest

Use a part of Appwrite, or all of it. Heck, go dig in our code or checkout our open sourced Functions runtime. We don't care, we just want you to do more while writing less code.

Both have their audience, both are great, see which one suits your needs better :)

What are the issues with self hosting Supabase?

Godot support would be awesome

Something like this? https://github.com/GodotNuts/appwrite-sdk

:)

Yes, Awesome!

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