TrailBase 0.34: Fast, open and single-executable Firebase alternative (5.6k⭐)

[u/trailbaseio]

TrailBase is an open and fast(est) Firebase-like backend (BaaS) for building your apps. It provides: type-safe APIs with change subscriptions, auth, multi-DB, a WebAssembly runtime, GeoJSON, admin UI, ...

It's a single self-contained executable, easy to self-host and built with Rust, Wasmtime & SQLite and more recently also Postgres. We provide clients for many environments: JS/TS, Dart/Flutter, Go, Rust, .Net, Kotlin, Swift and Python.

Just release v0.34.6. Since the last time posting here, TrailBase has added:

• Major UI overhauls:
  • Built-in admin OpenAPI browser with user-impersonation.
  • Table explorer: make foreign-keys followable, split data/schema/indexes into separate tabs, and organize tables/views by DB. Add `ON (DELETE|UPDATE)` referential action support to the schema editor.
  • Mobile glow-up and improved screen estate usage with sticky nav and url bar fade.
  • A searchable and interactive ERD page. Overhauled logs and accounts pages.
  • Many more: prompt users on schema changes in the SQL editor, improved dark-mode colors, add S3 settings, ...
• Built-in MCP server.
• Performance: a lot of detail performance optimizations (reduce allocations, ...) resulting in an additional 10+% gains.
• CLI auto-complete.
• Expose custom WASM endpoints in OpenAPI spec.
• "Sign-in with Apple" token exchange for native iOS/MacOS apps.
• Many more features and fixes, e.g.: `trail user export` CLI command for take-out combating lock-in, `trail run --read-only` flag for read replicas., batch execute support for WASM guests, custom scopes for OIDC providers, ...

The project is still young (~2 years) and rapidly evolving, any feedback is genuinely appreciated. If you're feeling adventures and end up checking it out, don't hesitate to reach out 🙏.

Take a look at the live demo, our GitHub or website.

[u/trailbaseio]

I appreciate you keeping me honest. Maybe you can help me out. According to the contributors tab there's a single 4-line commit. But when I click on the commit history nothing shows up:

[u/wanze → u/trailbaseio]

It's this PR: https://github.com/trailbaseio/trailbase/pull/290.

I don't know why the link you're looking at doesn't show it, because it is merged into main: https://github.com/trailbaseio/trailbase/commit/fe360821579ff4d6e3d34382bd935ad7b4c0b4ff

But GitHub is often weird like that.

[u/trailbaseio → u/wanze]

Appreciated 🙏. I guess I'll have to work on the absolutness of my - meant to be funny - slop replies going forward.

What's important to me:

• Thousands of hours of writing code went into the project. It won't just be abandoned. Sadly in practice, a lot of vibe coded projects that didn't require a lot of upfront investment will be abandoned as quickly.
• I care about quality, succinctness, readability and therefore maintainability. I understand that there's no business incentive to make LLMs terse, every output token pays dividends as future input tokens :)

I also want to make clear, this is not a shool project - the result matters more to me than how you got there. Not everyone is or can be a seasoned Rust dev.

I do have one (that I'm aware off) test-only pure vibe dependency for inprocess postgres testing. It has been interesting and a challenge from a reliability, debuggability perspective as well as tracking breacking version upgrades. What I'm trying to say, being mindful of suplychains is likely more important than ever

[u/wanze → u/trailbaseio]

I was just trying to provide information on the missing commit, not share an opinion on AI devleopment, but if we want to open that can of worm, then I unfortunately disagree with your view on AI development.

At least I read "I care about quality, succinctness, readability and therefore maintainability." and the following sentence to mean that AI code can't be quality, etc. Claude Opus (even Sonnet) has since 4.5 been very good, 5.0 and 5.5 has only made it better. Claude today writes better code than 95% of developers, if you let it. (And obviously better code than 100% of non-developers, who couldn't otherwise write anything, which is the scary part.)

But you get out what you put in – if you don't have the development experience to guide it to give you what you want, or you don't have the overview to recognize when it's taking a wrong turn and adjust it, you will indeed get slop. I'm not saying you don't have either of those–the fact that this project predates the slop era proves that–I'm just saying that that is why there is so much vibecoded garbage out there.

I'm a MSc CS with about 20 years of development experience, building PCI DSS systems as my job, and I rarely write code anymore myself. It's really just not worth it. All code of course gets reviewed, both by me an the assigned reviewers), and the code is on par with existing code in our projects. Sometimes even better.

If you don't end up embracing AI for development, then I think you will fall behind, if you're a professional developer.

But I do also understand why you're doing this: hoping your project will stand out from all the garbage out there. I'm torn on whether it'll works, because on the one hand, I've stopped added new projects to my own stack, because I don't trust them when they're created by somebody who doesn't understand the code, and thus can't even review it. But on the other hand, not embracing AI will reduce cadence for the project and it sets a tone for the project I don't agree with. However, the fact that you accepted this tiny Claude commit without question speaks another story than the one in this thread, which I think is positive.

[u/trailbaseio → u/wanze]

You should always do what works for you 👍. I'm not sure I see the contradiction or why your MSc would be relevant to me. I prefer subject over authority arguments 🤷‍♀️. Nobody said AI cannot provide value. It can absolutely help, especially when you're otherwise slow or lack experience.

[u/wanze → u/trailbaseio]

You seem to be getting almost offended by me mentioning my experience. I'll also remind you that you used the fact that there was "2 years of human commit history" as an argument for trusting you in another comment. Pot calling the kettle black.

Of course argument from authority is a fallacy, but I find it relevant as evidence that I am able to judge code quality. Lots of people make arguments about everything being AI slop, without ever having written a single line of code themselves. I'm trying to separate myself from that group of people, exactly the same way you are trying to prove in here that you aren't a vibecoder either. Pot calling the kettle black, again.

"Nobody said AI cannot provide value." – you saying "I care about quality, succinctness, readability and therefore maintainability" as an argument against AI development, is basically saying that you don't think AI code can be "quality, succinctness, readability and therefore maintainability". I'm not interested in debating semantics, but that's how it reads. If you meant something different, you should have written something different.

But I also did notice that you had downvoted my comment less than 2 minutes after posting it, which is not enough time for you to even read it. That tells me enough about your motivations for your interaction, and this is clearly not a good faith conversation on your part, so I'm done. :)