alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Typebase – A single-folder back end you write in TypeScript
Hey HN!
I built Typebase, a library that gives you Convex's DX with Supabase's openness.
After trying Supabase I liked how fast it is to spin up a DB and auth, but really didn't like using RLS and SQL for authorization. With Convex I loved how your server "lives" in your code, but disliked the DB model and the realtime-first defaults.
With Typebase you just write TS files inside a typebase/ folder in your existing repo. You can define your DB tables inside a schema.ts file and export server functions that your frontend calls like local functions, fully typed. Auth is built in.
Then one CLI command uploads your server to any of the available providers (Vercel, Cloudflare Workers or Deno Deploy for the servera and Neon for the DB), or generates the code so you can deploy it wherever you want.
Built on top of oRPC, Drizzle, and better-auth.
Happy to answer any questions or feedback!
Comments
I love the (well-disclosed) fake testimonials. Hilarious!
Fake reviews are a hard no-no imo. Really weird addition, but I suppose it wasn't you who got the idea.
Looks an awful lot like a orpc, just built on top of drizzle instead of raw queries. I'm sure some people want this, but it seems like gross duct tape that will bite you in three years
Very cool!
Note that you can run Convex on top of your own Postgres, and we do this for our internal apps, with very nice performance (plenty for our internal use cases).
very cool. though the deploy wasnt clear if i can just run migration on some pg url. and it wasnt clear if i can bind some middleware into my existing app server (like express)
This looks great. Question specifically on the Cloudflare Workers target: when you deploy there, does Typebase use D1 for the DB, or does the Postgres/Neon backend stay the same regardless of which server target you pick (Vercel/Workers/Deno) - i.e. is the DB layer decoupled from the server runtime, or does choosing Workers also mean choosing D1? I ask because I've shipped a small Workers+D1 service and the main friction I've hit isn't the server code, it's Workers' constraints around D1 (no long-running connections, HTTP-based driver quirks) - curious whether Typebase abstracts that away or whether you still feel it at the DB layer when targeting Workers specifically.
I’ve been curious about trying the Supabase type of RLS model for an app but haven’t yet. I like the idea of the db defined api like postgraphile and hasura but had trouble with testing and ergonomics. This looks pretty nice though, it’s cool that you’re thinking about ergonomics for working with coding agents. I feel like a hard thing with that rn is that everyone is kind of figuring out different workflows for AI coding right now so it’s hard to optimize DX. Can you talk a little about your personal agent workflow and how this fits it?