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Comment by Fire-Dragon-DoL | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I understand what exactly is. I like the tips, but I don't understand: is it an app that I can run on my local machine?

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It's a binary called "pocketbase" that you can download and run on your machine. When you run it, it starts a localhost web server. That server includes a web based UI tool that lets you create "collections" (effectively database tables) and insert/update/delete data in them.

More importantly, it provides a JSON API (and a client library) for interacting with those collections.

But people build apps on top of it and deploy it to the cloud, too, right? Does it then compete with stuff like AWS RDS?

I think it's more like a self-hosted Firebase - you run it on a server (with a disk drive that can persist the data) to get a hosted API for your apps to talk to.

Hmm... kind of. It's pretty substantially different from Firebase which is defacto NoSQL versus Pocketbase which uses SQL.

Given that it's based on SQLite I'd be very interested to know how well this would work as a true backend for a multiuser site that allows users to interact/post/etc.

If you have ever built a web app backend that consists of a database, a REST API for that database, and a web admin interface to the database - well, this gives you all of that for free, just by running an executable.

Ok so essentially an easy to host activeadmin (rails library). I think the single executable that runs on every os makes it very interesting for usecases where data is generated into a static site

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