Getting Started with Scribase

Scribase is an open application cloud built on PostgreSQL. It provides a durable control plane, branching data environments, and a full set of application-layer services — auth, storage, realtime subscriptions, and edge functions — all deployable as a single stack that you own.

What Scribase gives you

There are two ways in:

• Hosted Scribase — sign up, add a card ($1, credited back), and your backend is live with its URL and key in about a minute. Nothing to install. Follow the hosted quickstart.
• Local development — run the whole stack on your machine with the scribase CLI, below.

Quick start (local development)

1. Install the CLI and its prerequisites

The CLI is a single Rust binary named scribase. Build it from a checkout of the Scribase source with Rust 1.85 or newer:

cargo install --locked --path crates/scribase-cli
scribase version

The source repository is private while Scribase is in early access; email hello@scribase.com for access. If you only need the hosted platform, skip the CLI and use the SDK instead.

Local databases use your installed PostgreSQL 17 server binaries (initdb and pg_ctl must be on PATH — for example brew install postgresql@17 on macOS or the postgresql-17 package on Debian/Ubuntu). The optional application services are the upstream service binaries — gotrue (auth), storage-api (storage), realtime, and edge-runtime (functions) — found next to the scribase binary or on PATH. A missing service is skipped with a message; the database always comes up.

# Check your API configuration once you have a token (optional for local work)
scribase doctor

2. Start the local stack

From your project directory, start the full local stack — Postgres, auth, storage, realtime, and functions — with one command. No Docker and no configuration file are required for the database; service binaries are resolved from the same directory as the scribase binary or from PATH.

scribase dev

Scribase boots Postgres locally, runs bootstrap migrations, then brings up the application services. The process blocks and prints connection information:

preflight: service binaries
  auth       found    /usr/local/bin/gotrue
  storage    found    /usr/local/bin/storage-api
  realtime   found    /usr/local/bin/realtime
  functions  found    /usr/local/bin/edge-runtime
database ready at .scribase

To start only specific services:

scribase dev --services auth,storage

3. Apply a schema

scribase dev up --schema schema.scribase

The schema file uses the Scribase schema language — a typed model definition that compiles to Postgres DDL with row-level security policies baked in. See Aegis Policy Compiler for the policy syntax.

4. Connect

scribase dev url prints the connection string for the primary database:

psql "$(scribase dev url)"

5. Branch for a feature

scribase branch new my-feature
# returns the branch connection string

Scribase uses copy-on-write snapshots to create branches in under a second. Each branch is an independent Postgres cluster under .scribase/.

Next steps

• Hosted quickstart — sign up, create a token, make your first API call
• Your own cluster, by agreement — for a deployment outside hosted Scribase
• CLI reference — all commands and flags
• Control API — the /v1 REST interface
• SDK — the scribase TypeScript client
• Concepts — branching, auth, storage, realtime

Configuration

The local stack resolves configuration from environment variables.