Setting Up Your Database on Supabase Cloud

Supabase runs the database; you own the project. It is the quickest of the three homes and suits most firms. This guide follows the Database step of your setup on pental.io, which shows the same five steps, opens the right page of your own project at each one, and checks each step from your browser before the next.

Pros and cons

Before you start

• A Supabase account. Signing up is free, and the free tier is enough to try Pental on; a firm working on it for real wants a paid plan, for its daily backups.
• Your pental.io account, on the Database step of the setup (or later, on your dashboard under Portal Configuration, then Database).

Create a Supabase project

1. Open Supabase and sign in, or create an account.
2. Press New project. Name it (Pental portal, say) and set a database password. Keep the password in your password manager: Pental never needs it, and nobody at Pental can recover it.
3. For Region, pick a specific region, such as West Europe (London), rather than a general area such as Europe: a specific region keeps the data in the one place you chose. The setup names the one nearest you, from your time zone.
4. Press Create new project and let Supabase start it.
5. Copy the address from your browser’s address bar while you are on the project (any page of it) and paste it into Your project’s address. The project ID on its own works too.

From then on, every link in the setup opens that project’s own page: its API keys, a new query in its SQL editor, and its auth hooks.

Copy its publishable key

On the project’s API Keys page, copy the key labelled Publishable; it starts sb_publishable_. Paste it into Publishable key and the setup asks your project at once whether it accepts it.

Run the setup SQL

1. Press Copy the setup SQL. If your browser will not copy it, or download it saves the same SQL as a file.
2. Press Open the SQL editor, which opens a new query in your project.
3. Paste the SQL in and press Run. It ends with “Success. No rows returned.”

It makes every table, security policy and function the portal needs, inside your project. You can read every line before you run it, and nobody at Pental runs it for you. The setup watches for it and ticks the step by itself once it is in.

Turn on the access token hook

The hook copies the time of each person’s last second-factor check into their sign-in, so the portal is not asking for the second factor every time a session refreshes. The portal works without it, but asks far more often.

1. Press Open Auth Hooks, then Add hook, and choose Customize Access Token (JWT) Claims.
2. Set Enabled on, Hook type to Postgres, Postgres schema to public and Postgres function to custom_access_token_hook.
3. Press Create hook, then tick I have turned it on in the setup.

Supabase shows this setting to nobody but you, so the setup cannot check it and asks you to tick it instead.

Connect your portal

Press Check and connect. Pental checks every service the portal uses (tables, sign-in, files and live updates), then connects your portal to the project. Only the publishable key is kept.

Keeping it updated

When a release changes the schema, the portal shows Database update available to the people who can change settings, and your pental.io dashboard says the same under Database. Press Copy SQL, then Open SQL editor, paste and Run. It is the same file you ran at setup: it only adds what is missing and never touches your data, and until it runs the portal carries on as it was, with only the new features waiting.

If something is not right

Moving later

If a client asks for the data on your own servers, or you simply change your mind, move it to self-hosted Supabase or PostgreSQL in your cloud, with everything in it. For the move you need the project’s service key: API Keys, then Legacy API keys, then service_role.