Building a Rails app with Supabase & Render

When building side projects or a prototype, it’s better to use managed services to build faster.

Supabase is a managed service that provides a Postgres database. With Render, we can host our applications.

In this article, we’ll walk through setting up Supabase as the database for a Rails app and deploying it on Render. I’ll also highlight two mistakes I made along the way, so you can avoid them.

Supabase

First, let’s set up Supabase as the database for our Rails app.

• Create a project from Supabase dashboard
• After creating the project, click on connection button to get the connection URL
• Ensure pg gem is installed in the application
• Add DATABASE_URL in .env file
• In config/database.yml, configure the production database

production:
  adaptor: postgresql
  encoding: unicode
  url: <%= ENV["DATABASE_URL"] %>

Now, Active Record will use supabase as the postgres database.

Render

Next, let’s deploy our application on Render.

• From the dashboard, create new web service
• Select the repository you want to host
• Add build command

bundle install; bundle exec rake assets:precompile; bundle exec rake assets:clean;

• Add start command

bundle exec rails db:migrate && bundle exec rails server -b 0.0.0.0 -p ${PORT:-3000}

• Deploy!

Common Mistakes

• Render
  • Ensure db:migrate is included in the start command; without it, the database won’t be created.
  • I forgot this and spent time figuring out why the database didn’t work.
• Supabase
  • For the connection string, use ‘Session Pooler’.
  • I had selected ‘Transaction Pooler’ initially, which caused queries to fail.