Hey HN, we’re excited about this launch. This was a collaborative effort with the team at Snaplet [0].

postgres-wasm is an embeddable Linux VM with Postgres installed, which runs inside a browser. It provides some neat features: persisting state to browser, restoring from pg_dump, logical replication from a remote database, etc.

The idea was inspired by CrunchyData’s HN post about a month ago [1]. We love the possibilities of Postgres+WASM, and so Supabase & Snaplet teamed up to create an open source version. The linked blog post explains the technical difficulties we encountered, and the architecture decisions we made.

We’re still working hard on this, but it’s at a good “MVP” stage where you can run it yourself. Snaplet are working on a feature where you can drag-and-drop a snapshot into your browser to restore the state from any backup. Supabase are exploring ways we can run the entire Supabase stack inside the browser. You can find the Snaplet repo here [2], and the Supabase fork here [3]. There’s very little difference between these two, we just have a different browser UI.

Both Supabase team and the Snaplet team will be in here commenting if you want to know anything else about the technical details.

[0] Snaplet: https://www.snaplet.dev/

[1] Crunchy post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32498435

[2] Snaplet repo: https://github.com/snaplet/postgres-wasm

[3] Supabase fork: https://github.com/supabase-community/postgres-wasm

> an embeddable Linux VM with Postgres installed, which runs inside a browser.

Wow! I feel like this is the lede. How much work was done supporting the VM and OS privatives (eg networking) vs PG specific work? I feel like a minimal Linux in the browser opens up a LOT more opportunities than just a database.

When figma got bought out, a lot of articles were written about “where’s the wasm applications”, and I feel like throwing Linux into a browser really shows potential. One commenter already wondered if it could be used to compile microcontrollers (so creative, i now want that too), I wonder if it can be used similar to Repl.it, with packaging test environments.

To be very, very clear, I would LOVE a write up about just the linux portion of this interesting project.

All of the heavy lifting here is done by v86: https://github.com/copy/v86

v86 can be used for a number of things besides Postgres - things like Repls or other entire applications are definitely achievable.

Networking between Postgres and the internet was a lot of work, and Mark came up with a neat solution detailed in the blog post. This solution can be used for any other application. If you're looking to run a native application in the browser using v86, the repo & blog post is a good launching pad.