Setting Up Pental, End to End
Registering, signing in, and the free trial0:00
- 0:00Registering, signing in, and the free trialSigning up on pental.io. The address you use here becomes the first admin of the portal. MFA is required: a security key, or an authenticator app, and a key still needs an app as a backup. No card for the trial, and its days start when your portal is live.
- 0:44Your name and your firm’s nameThe two fields the portal and its documents carry from here on.
- 0:50Custom domainThe first half of white-labelling: the address your portal runs on, on a domain you own. A CNAME for a subdomain, an A record for a root domain. Verification polls by itself and can take up to fifteen minutes. A trial can start on a pental.io address instead and move here later.
- Your own database, three waysWatch the one you are setting up.
- 1:35PostgreSQL in your cloudYour cloud’s own PostgreSQL on Azure, AWS or Google Cloud, or a server of yours, with the small Pental gateway beside it. The Database step writes one command with your portal and region in it, which builds the database and the gateway and prints what the setup asks for. Updates apply themselves.
- 3:10Self-hosted SupabaseSupabase’s open-source stack on a Linux server you run, from the kit the setup gives you. One paste on the server installs it, makes its secrets and starts it, and the stack builds the portal’s database itself, with no SQL to copy. Updates apply themselves.
- 3:58Supabase CloudCreating a Supabase project, running the setup SQL with RLS, registering the access token hook, then pasting the project ID and publishable key. The free tier is enough to start; the schema sets RLS on every table itself.
- 5:45Your own email serverThe second half of white-labelling. Connecting a Microsoft 365 mailbox (sign in with an account that has Send As rights if it is a shared mailbox), or SMTP with a password. Then the test email. Until it is connected, Pental’s email service sends for you.
- 6:55Branding, and finishing setupLogo at roughly 4:1, favicon at 1:1, light and dark themes with a logo each if you want, and the support address your clients see on the login page.
- 7:39Signing in as the first adminThe same account that set the portal up. If the first email did not arrive, Forgot password sets one instead. Then the same MFA steps as before.
- 8:13Updating the database on Supabase CloudSupabase Cloud onlyPostgreSQL in your cloud and self-hosted Supabase apply Pental’s updates themselves, so this part is Supabase Cloud’s alone. When a release needs a schema change, a banner says so: copy the SQL, open the editor, run it. Your clients never see it and the portal keeps working; only the new features wait.
- 9:02Moving your database between homesEverything (people, clients, findings, files and secrets) goes from the portal’s database to a new one in either of the other two homes, from your own browser, and the two are compared table by table. The portal switches over only when you say so, and nothing passes through Pental.
10:01, in 11 chapters, in the order you will do it: registering, your own domain, your own database in any of three places, your own mail server, branding, the first sign-in, updating the database on Supabase Cloud, and moving the database if you change your mind. The setup guide, with a written guide for each database