Setup

Creating your database and installing the schema

The first thing you do in Pental: create a Postgres project in your own account, pick its region, and install the schema into it. Ten minutes, no database experience needed.

6 min read

Pental runs on a database you own. Before the portal exists there is a short setup step where you create that database, choose where it lives, and let the platform install its schema into it. This guide walks the whole thing, including the two decisions worth thinking about before you start.

Decide the region first

The region is fixed when the project is created, and it becomes the answer you give every client who asks where their data is held. Pick the one your buyers will expect: London or Frankfurt for UK and EU clients, Sydney for Australia, and so on. If most of your work is public sector or regulated, choose to match the strictest contract in your book rather than the average one.

Changing region later means creating a new project and migrating into it. It is a five-minute decision that saves an afternoon.

Create the project

Sign up for a Supabase account, or sign in to one you already have. It is your account, under your billing, and Pental never becomes an administrator of it.
Create a new project. Give it a name you will recognise in twelve months, and set a strong database password. Store that password in your own password manager: it is yours, and nobody at Pental can recover it for you.
Choose the region you settled on above.
Wait for provisioning to finish. It usually takes a couple of minutes.

Connect it to Pental

Pental asks for two values from that project: its URL and its service key, both found in the project settings under API. Paste them into the setup step and the platform installs the schema: the tables, the row-level security policies, the functions and the storage buckets. Nothing is copied out of the project during this, and nothing about your engagements is stored anywhere else.

When the install finishes you sign in to your portal for the first time as the administrator. From here the portal is the only interface you need day to day.

What to do immediately afterwards

Enrol your second factor. The portal asks on first sign-in and it gates access to data, so it is not optional.
Set your company details under Settings, so proposals and invoices carry the right registration and address.
Point your domain at the portal, covered in the domain guide, before you invite a single client.
Check the backup settings in your Supabase project. Backups are part of the platform there, and because the project is yours you can add your own dumps or replication on top.

Verifying the install

If you want to see what was created, connect to the project with psql or the Supabase SQL editor using your own credentials. Counting the policies with a select against pg_policies tells you how many row-level security rules are protecting your data, and how many tables they cover. Everything the platform claims about your database is checkable from inside it, which is the point of the arrangement.

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