Edge functions: Node and native NPM compatibility | Hacker News Reader

Edge functions: Node and native NPM compatibility

supabase.com

87 pointsjacobwg29 comments

Hey, thanks for sharing this on HN! I'm one of the Edge Functions developers at Supabase and co-author of the blog post. We are very excited about releasing npm support and looking forward to seeing how the community build awesome apps with the Supabase stack.

I am happy to answer any questions or receive feedback.

how deep does the support go? i.e. can we safely import from node platform builtins like `os` or are the same bundling gymnastics still required there? (fwiw this is one of the major issues with vercel's edge funcs)

Most builtin modules should work (except for things like `vm` which we cannot safely sandbox in edge runtime). Deno has a good guide on the compatibility of built-in modules https://docs.deno.com/runtime/manual/node/compatibility

You can do: ``` import os from "node:os" console.log(os.hostname()) ```

and it should just work both locally and when deployed. No extra steps needed.

hey hn, supabase ceo here

this is the #1 feature request from our community wrt Edge Functions. Our Functions run Deno, and so a lot of developers struggle to migrate from Node. This update solves that. It was a lot of work - in the words of one of the developers: "the hardest thing I have implemented".

It's nice because it brings 100% feature parity across local dev, the platform, and self-hosting.

We also added a Sentry integration for observability and "Regional Invocations" for connecting to a Function in one particular region (useful if you want to execute a Function close to your database).

I'm just clocking off but the engineer who shipped this is waking up and will be around for any technical discussion.

Do you support Prisma? I don't recommend using Drizzle because their migrations tool is completely proprietary and closed source, but they bundle it with their open source offering in a bait and switch.

I haven't tried Prisma myself, but hopefully this guide should work with Edge Functions with npm https://supabase.com/partners/integrations/prisma

That's not talking about edge functions specifically though is it? Surely there are extra steps required

If not, I'm shocked and very impressed. I wouldn't have expected prisma to work at all

Prisma is going to significantly improve support for edge functions soon. We are compiling our Query Engine to WASM, and have already added support for Serverless APIs from PlanetScale and Neon.

You can fill out the survey here if you'd like early access to this: https://github.com/prisma/prisma/issues/21394

We'll make some noice about this together with Supabase when it is ready, so you won't miss it :-)

Is GraphQL still used internally?

We changed the wire protocol in Prisma 4.11. You can read about the significant performance improvements here: https://www.prisma.io/blog/prisma-5-f66prwkjx72s

Thanks

Does prisma support database level joins now?

do yourself a favor and ditch Prisma. It's a bloody mess of a project and codebase. I recommend https://github.com/drizzle-team/drizzle-orm to anyone that'll listen.

If anybody has problems with Prisma, please reach out to me on Twitter. DMs open: https://twitter.com/sorenbs

There's roughly 2900 issues still open from people that are having problems with Prisma https://github.com/prisma/prisma/issues

Great, I paused my project just waiting on this issue

These last months open source has churned out several projects that are components to what I'm experimenting on and it feels great to be able to build on top of solid projects

> We run an open source Deno server for hosting Edge Functions called Supabase Edge Runtime.

With full npm and node compatibility. Interesting.

source: https://github.com/supabase/edge-runtime

we needed this to get feature parity across local, the platform, and self-hosting

I bet this is cool in some way, but old me can't help but compare this approach to the delightful horror story here from some decades ago...

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the-inner-json-effect

>2016 >Decades ago

Jfc I’m not that old

Hey, can you explain what you mean to me? I read the JDSL horror story but I don't see what it has to do with deno runtimes... what am I missing?

I'm looking for compatibility tables/information, but can't find the right place to look.

Anyone have any idea how well Edge Functions for Javascript works with Edge's Javascript functions?

Cloudflare, please take a look !

Don't they already support (many, not all) NPM packages?

https://blog.cloudflare.com/node-js-support-cloudflare-worke...

https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/runtime-apis/nodej...

are supabase edge functions faster/better than Vercel edge functions

Vercel edge functions don't support node so it would be an overall win if the answer is yes.

Vercel edge functions are Cloudflare Workers under the hood. I'm pretty sure Supabase is using Deno Deploy/Subhosting. There's a lot of nuance to comparing these two offerings but in short what I'd say is if you like the supabase platform offerings with all the tightly integrated goodies than you will likely benefit way more from going with Supabase functions.

Vercel is increasingly trying to offer all these integrated goodies too but imo right now most of them are off-the-shelf things like "a postgres db" (powered by neondb platform) a "kv redis store" (powered by upstash) and they seem to be betting their user's want to use their own pg/redis cli's & sdk's to manage & access the data from the edge functions (versus supabase's sdk's which unify auth, db, functions, etc.).

Both options do have their benefits but if you want everything tightly integrated with a friendly management UI, sdk & auth Supabase can save you tons of time!

In terms of speed I still think nothing beats cloudflare workers (way more geographically distributed points of presence so even closer to more users). However I think vercel's edge functions only use a subset of the total cloudflare workers PoPs. But I highly doubt the average use-case or user would ever notice the difference in latency between cloudflare workers & supabase edge functions so i don't know if that should be your determining factor. (And let's not get started on the debate of "edge doesn't matter if it's far from your db". If supabase is doing any magic to make their edge functions "close" to the db that's a huge win!)

Another option is to go full cloudflare ecosystem (they too have a kv store & now a limited sql db) but, again, I do not think their ecosystem gives you the all-in-one goodness that supabase does (no auth offering, definitely no way to tie together db/kv/auth with one sdk/management dashboard).

Yet another option is to go with fly.io + tursodb. Like deno & cloudflare workers they have their own geographically distributed PoP's that run lightweight, optimized firecracker vms running any of your dockerfile desires. With this you get even more freedom and control but you also need to get your hands a bit dirty in flyio's cli & platform magic. Also while turso is super interesting it's very new and they seem to be pushing more of a "have a database per user" than "host one giant multitenant db".

I have compared all these offerings, weighed the pros / cons. In the end don't let it paralyze you! Nearly all these offerings have enough standardized pathways in and out of them (or similar standard protocols like sql, postgres protocol, exports, cf runtime even has limited node/npm support for instance) to where lock-in should not too big a fear in the beginning. Worst case try to write abstractions for db-access, auth-hooks, kv-access, maybe runtime-specific logic so that you can adapt the abstraction to benefit app-wide if you ever need to migrate to another runtime/db.

Hope this helps!

> I'm pretty sure Supabase is using Deno Deploy/Subhosting.

We self-host the Edge Runtime now:

https://github.com/supabase/edge-runtime

How are you handling the security boundary between tenants? Is each edge function run in a separate Deno process in a VM?

We have a cluster of Edge Runtime instances in each region. We run multiple edge functions within an instance using v8 isolates (Deno's core runtime is a wrapper around v8 isolates). This setup provides a good balance between cost and security. Other edge hosting providers like Cloudflare also follow a similar setup.

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