I’ve recently been experimenting with a SupaBase (Supabase is an open source Firebase alternative) integration into Bubble, working on seeing if I can transfer all the data from a Bubble application to a centralised database. Moving the data from your Bubble app to SupaBase means you are no longer reliant on Bubble and could migrate to another front-end much easier in the future. It also allow for greater data redundancy and backup capabilities which are just not available via Bubble.

The follow up to this is then to look at using a single database for multiple Bubble applications at the same time. 

This is to be combined with a single login for all the apps at the same time, meaning that users can have one email + password combination that works on all the connected Apps, and changing the password on one, updates it everywhere. The easiest way to do this is through Supabase’s “Users” functionality, and have them login from Bubble, storing as little as possible in the individual Bubble database.

As SupaBase has complete support through cURL API calls, I’ve been able to easily move data from my apps into the database, modify and delete any records with requests from Bubble and essentially shift my entire backend away from Bubble.

As every SupaBase user has their own Auth token, you can securely authenticate all users, combined with SupaBase’s security rules to lock down as much data access as necessary.

While the build is still underway, my experience so far in using this system is overall a very positive one. The documentation is very clear, as is the error handling. The most confusing part of this was trying to put Option Sets into SupaBase, as it can be reasonably tricky to put a list of foreign keys into a single field in another table.

Instead, you can build it as an “Enumerated List”, which is similar to Bubble’s Option Sets, except you can’t put extra data on these items. They’re a single field and that’s all they support. E.G. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc. but you can’t then have a field of “day number” 1, 2, 3 attached to the same item.

More detail on this in a future post