Serverless APIs

Supabase auto-generates three types of API directly from your database schema.

• REST - connect to your database through a restful interface, directly from the browser.
• Realtime - for listening to database changes.
• GraphQL - a fast and auto-generate GraphQL API.

All the APIs are auto-generated from your database and are designed to get you building as fast as possible, without writing a single line of code.

You can use them directly from the browser (two-tier architecture), or as a complement to your own API server (three-tier architecture).

Features#

• Instant and auto-generated.
  As you update your database the changes are immediately accessible through your API.
• Self documenting.
  Supabase generates documentation in the Dashboard which updates as you make database changes.
• Secure.
  The API is configured to work with PostgreSQL's Row Level Security, provisioned behind an API gateway with key-auth enabled.
• Fast.
  Our benchmarks for basic reads are more than 300% faster than Firebase. The API is a very thin layer on top of Postgres, which does most of the heavy lifting.
• Scalable.
  The API can serve thousands of simultaneous requests, and works well for Serverless workloads.

REST API #

Supabase provides a RESTful API using PostgREST. This is a very thin API layer on top of Postgres. It provides everything you need from a CRUD API:

• Basic CRUD operations
• Deeply nested joins, allowing you to fetch data from multiple tables in a single fetch
• Works with Postgres Views
• Works with Postgres Functions
• Works with the Postgres security model - including Row Level Security, Roles, and Grants.

GraphQL API #

GraphQL in Supabase works through pg_graphql, an open source PostgreSQL extension for GraphQL.

Realtime API #

Supabase provides a Realtime API using Realtime. You can use this to listen to database changes over websockets. Realtime leverages PostgreSQL's built-in logical replication. You can manage your Realtime API simply by managing Postgres publications. Go to your project's Replication section to get started.