Supabase is primarily a cloud-based service for building application backends with PostgreSQL However it’s built on open-source tools and offers a way for users to host the service on their own servers. You can have a look at the official guide here. The guide provides an overview of the Supabase architecture and the steps we need to follow to set it up. So why do you need this article? The official guide is server agnostic and does not include details on setting it up on a specific platform, but this article will walk you through the steps required to host Supabase on an Ubuntu server on Digital Ocean. Many of the concepts will be applicable to other Linux distributions. The main difference will be the steps required to install the required tools. ## Prerequisites So let’s get started. Once your Ubuntu server is ready you’ll need to have Git, Docker and Docker Compose installed. If you’re starting from scratch the easiest way to get these is to use a Droplet with docker preinstalled. I chose the 2 GB RAM option. If you have an existing server and need to install Docker Compose manually you can follow this guide. Once that’s completed you’ll need to create a hostname and then either set a password or an SSH key for your droplet. I’ll set a password for this guide. With that done we can then login via ssh. ssh root@dropletipaddress Next we add a regular user. This can be anything but I'll use "supabase". adduser supabase After you've finished entering the user details you'll want to grant the user sudo privileges. usermod -aG sudo supabase Next, login as that user. su supabase Now the fun begins. Clone the Supabase repo and cd into the docker directory. cd ~ git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/supabase/supabase cd supabase/docker Create the .env file from the .env.example template. cp .env.example .env This is technically all you need to run Supabase but it's not secure. It uses the default keys from the repository. Generating these keys is super easy though. There is a key generator in the Supabase guide. You can generate the ANON_KEY and SERVICE_KEY with the "preconfigured payload" dropdown. Replace the default values in the .env file. Replace the JWT_SECRET also. You'll also need to generate a database password. You can refresh the page and generate a new value for the JWT_SECRET and use that. POSTGRES_PASSWORD=your-super-secret-and-long-postgres-password JWT_SECRET=your-super-secret-jwt-token-with-at-least-32-characters-long ANON_KEY=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyAgCiAgICAicm9sZSI6ICJhbm9uIiwKICAgICJpc3MiOiAic3VwYWJhc2UtZGVtbyIsCiAgICAiaWF0IjogMTY0MTc2OTIwMCwKICAgICJleHAiOiAxNzk5NTM1NjAwCn0.dc_X5iR_VP_qT0zsiyj_I_OZ2T9FtRU2BBNWN8Bu4GE SERVICE_ROLE_KEY=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyAgCiAgICAicm9sZSI6ICJzZXJ2aWNlX3JvbGUiLAogICAgImlzcyI6ICJzdXBhYmFzZS1kZW1vIiwKICAgICJpYXQiOiAxNjQxNzY5MjAwLAogICAgImV4cCI6IDE3OTk1MzU2MDAKfQ.DaYlNEoUrrEn2Ig7tqibS-PHK5vgusbcbo7X36XVt4Q You also need to set the ANON_KEY and SERVICE_ROLE_KEY in docker/volumes/api/kong.yml consumers: - username: anon keyauth_credentials: - key: eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyAgCiAgICAicm9sZSI6ICJhbm9uIiwKICAgICJpc3MiOiAic3VwYWJhc2UtZGVtbyIsCiAgICAiaWF0IjogMTY0MTc2OTIwMCwKICAgICJleHAiOiAxNzk5NTM1NjAwCn0.dc_X5iR_VP_qT0zsiyj_I_OZ2T9FtRU2BBNWN8Bu4GE - username: service_role keyauth_credentials: - key: eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyAgCiAgICAicm9sZSI6ICJzZXJ2aWNlX3JvbGUiLAogICAgImlzcyI6ICJzdXBhYmFzZS1kZW1vIiwKICAgICJpYXQiOiAxNjQxNzY5MjAwLAogICAgImV4cCI6IDE3OTk1MzU2MDAKfQ.DaYlNEoUrrEn2Ig7tqibS-PHK5vgusbcbo7X36XVt4Q If you're going to be sending emails for magic links for instance you'll need to update the SMTP configuration with your provider. It's not absolutely necessary to get the system to run. You can come back to it later if you don't need it immediately. ## Email auth ENABLE_EMAIL_SIGNUP=true ENABLE_EMAIL_AUTOCONFIRM=false [email protected] SMTP_HOST=mail SMTP_PORT=2500 SMTP_USER=fake_mail_user SMTP_PASS=fake_mail_password SMTP_SENDER_NAME=fake_sender Finally, you need to change the PUBIC_REST_URL to use the public ip address to access Studio remotely. API_EXTERNAL_URL=http://dropletipaddress:8000 PUBLIC_REST_URL=http://dropletipaddress:8000/rest/v1/ You can now run the container. From the docker directory run: docker-compose up If you get a permission error, you'll need to add your user to the docker group. docker.errors.DockerException: Error while fetching server API version: ('Connection aborted.', PermissionError(13, 'Permission denied')) sudo usermod -aG docker supabase Try docker-compose up again The first time takes a while as all the images are downloaded. If all the services run without error then you're good to go. It will look something like this: supabase-storage | [1664936808931] INFO (7 on 8883c6916b0d): Server listening at http://0.0.0.0:5000 supabase-storage | Server listening at http://0.0.0.0:5000 supabase-rest | 05/Oct/2022:02:26:50 +0000: Listening on port 3000 supabase-rest | 05/Oct/2022:02:26:50 +0000: Connection successful supabase-rest | 05/Oct/2022:02:26:50 +0000: Config re-loaded supabase-rest | 05/Oct/2022:02:26:50 +0000: Listening for notifications on the pgrst channel supabase-rest | 05/Oct/2022:02:26:50 +0000: Schema cache loaded supabase-realtime | 2022-10-05 02:27:03.096 [info] Running RealtimeWeb.Endpoint with cowboy 2.8.0 at :::4000 (http) supabase-realtime | 2022-10-05 02:27:03.097 [info] Access RealtimeWeb.Endpoint at http://localhost:4000 supabase-realtime | 2022-10-05 02:27:06.141 [info] tzdata release in place is from a file last modified Wed, 21 Oct 2020 18:40:20 GMT. Release file on server was last modified Sat, 24 Sep 2022 04:40:44 GMT. supabase-realtime | 2022-10-05 02:27:07.265 [info] Tzdata has updated the release from 2020d to 2022d Now to verify that the everything is configured correctly you can try to open Studio in your desktop browser. Navigate to http:dropletipaddress:3000 You should see the following: Select Default project. You should see the following screen: If on the other hand you see a connecting to database screen then there is something wrong with your configuration. Double check it and try again. Running docker-compose down shuts down the containers and removes them. This destroys the database. ctrl+c shuts down the containers without destroying the database. You can also run docker-compose up without shutting down the containers which will reload the containers with the changes to the .env file. You can connect to the Supabase service directly using your public ip and the kong port number (8000) but for a real project you'll want to use an SSL secured domain. To do this you'll need an HTTP proxy server. Nginx is quite popular and there are articles covering how to configure it but my preference is Caddy for its relative ease of configuration compared to Nginx. To install it run the following commands: sudo apt install -y debian-keyring debian-archive-keyring apt-transport-https -y curl -1sLf 'https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/caddy/stable/gpg.key' | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/caddy-stable-archive-keyring.gpg curl -1sLf 'https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/caddy/stable/debian.deb.txt' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/caddy-stable.list sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install caddy -y Open the HTTP ports. sudo ufw allow proto tcp from any to any port 80,443 To configure a domain and to secure the studio with a login and password edit /etc/caddy/Caddyfile and add the following: sudo vim /etc/caddy/Caddyfile https://yourdomain.com { reverse_proxy /rest/v1/* localhost:8000 reverse_proxy /auth/v1/* localhost:8000 reverse_proxy /realtime/v1/* localhost:8000 reverse_proxy /storage/v1/* localhost:8000 reverse_proxy * localhost:3000 basicauth / { yourusername $yourhashedpassword } } To generate $yourhashedpassword, run: caddy hash-password This will prompt you to enter and confirm your password and will generate a hashed version of it. Copy that value to the Caddyfile in place of $yourhashedpassword. Save the file and restart caddy. sudo service caddy restart Update the .env file to use your domain. API_EXTERNAL_URL=https://yourdomain.com PUBLIC_REST_URL=https://yourdomain.com/rest/v1/ Stop the Supabase containers. ctrl+c Start the containers docker-compose up Now navigate to https://yourdomain.com and verify that it loads Studio and it connects to the database. For a more complete test, configure one of the the Supabase sample projects. The user management sample is a good choice as it would features using the REST API, Auth and Storage.