Please keep in mind that PocketBase is still under active development and full backward compatibility is not guaranteed before reaching v1.0.0. PocketBase is not recommended for production critical applications yet, unless you are fine with reading the changelog and applying some manual migration steps from time to time.

PocketBase is an open source backend consisting of embedded database (SQLite) with realtime subscriptions, built-in auth management, convenient dashboard UI and simple REST-ish API.

The easiest way to get started is to download the prebuilt minimal PocketBase app:

See the GitHub Releases page for other platforms and more details.

Once you've extracted the archive, you could start the application by running ./pocketbase serve in the extracted directory.

And that's it! A web server will be started with the following routes:

The first time, when you access the Admin dashboard UI, it will prompt you to create your first admin account (email and pass).

The prebuilt PocketBase executable will automatically create and manage 2 new directories alongside the executable:

  • pb_data - stores your application data, uploaded files, etc. (usually should be added in .gitignore).
  • pb_migrations - contains JS migration files with your collection changes (can be safely committed in your repository).
    You can even write custom migration scripts. For more info check the JS migrations docs.

You could find all available commands and their options by running ./pocketbase --help or ./pocketbase [command] --help

Next: Collections