kysely-supabase

Supabase is a combination of open-source tools. They're building the features of Firebase using enterprise-grade, open-source products. If the tools and communities exist, with an MIT, Apache 2, or equivalent open license, they will use and support that tool. If the tool doesn't exist, they build and open-source it themselves. Supabase is not a 1-to-1 mapping of Firebase. Their aim is to give developers a Firebase-like developer experience using open-source tools.

As of Apr 6, 2024, @supabase/supabase-js (the client library) has 292,860 weekly downloads on npm, while supabase (the CLI) has 80,273 weekly downloads on npm. It is a popular all-in-one development platform for Node.js and TypeScript.

Their CLI supports TypeScript type generation from your Supabase-managed PostgreSQL database, and their client library provides a nice, albeit restrictive, auto-completion friendly, and type-safe developer experience. For anything beyond what the client library's API offers, you're left with writing raw SQL and using PostgreSQL drivers like pg or postgres, or some abstraction where you codegen or define schema/types again.

Kysely (pronounced “Key-Seh-Lee”) is a type-safe and autocompletion-friendly TypeScript SQL query builder. Inspired by Knex. Mainly developed for Node.js but also runs on Deno and in the browser.

kysely-supabase is a toolkit (type translators for now) that allows using your existing Supabase setup with Kysely.

Installation

npm i kysely @supabase/supabase-js
npm i -D kysely-supabase supabase

For PostgreSQL:

npm i pg

or

npm i kysely-postgres-js postgres

Usage

Types

Translate your Supabase-generated Database type to Kysely's Database interface via the KyselifyDatabase helper type.

src/types/database.ts:

import type {Database as SupabaseDatabase} from 'path/to/supabase/generated/types/file'
import type {KyselifyDatabase} from 'kysely-supabase'

export type Database = KyselifyDatabase<SupabaseDatabase>

Kysely Instance

Create a Kysely instance. Pass to it your Database type.

src/kysely.ts:

import {Kysely, PostgresDialect} from 'kysely'
import {Pool} from 'pg'
import type {Database} from './types/database'

export const kysely = new Kysely<Database>({
  dialect: new PostgresDialect({
    pool: new Pool({
      connectionString: process.env.DATABASE_URL,
    }),
  }),
})

or when using postgres instead of pg as the underlying driver:

import {Kysely} from 'kysely'
import {PostgresJSDialect} from 'kysely-postgres-js'
import postgres from 'postgres'
import type {Database} from './types/database'

export const kysely = new Kysely<Database>({
  dialect: new PostgresJSDialect({
    postgres: postgres(process.env.DATABASE_URL),
  }),
})

Acknowledgements

KyselifyDatabase helper type was inspired by Gilbert's issue.