How it works

One file is the whole backend

You download the PocketBase binary, run it, and in about a second you have a running server with an embedded SQLite database, a REST API generated for you, email and OAuth logins, file uploads with thumbnails, a realtime stream, and a full admin UI. Things you’d normally bolt on as separate services are already there.

Collections are your tables

Create a collection in the browser and PocketBase hands you a full REST API — list, view, create, update, delete, with filtering, sorting, and pagination — without a line of endpoint code. Access control lives on the collection as small rule expressions the database checks on every request, so a forgotten guard can’t leak data. Every schema change is a versioned migration in your repo.

HTMX makes plain HTML feel alive

Instead of downloading a framework, booting it, fetching JSON, and rendering HTML in the browser, a click or a form fires a request straight from an HTML attribute. The server sends back finished HTML and HTMX drops it into the page. The server stays the source of truth, there’s far less client code to break, and the back button, bookmarks, and caching all still work. Search engines see real HTML.

One process owns everything

PocketBase is also a Go library, so the pages you see are rendered by hooks running inside the same binary that owns the database, the auth, and the files. There’s no frontend server phoning a backend server across the network — data and markup come from the same place in one round trip.

Deploy is: move one file

Copy the binary to a server and run it. No cluster, no container graph, no separate database to provision first. PocketBase can even fetch and renew its own Let’s Encrypt certificate. Your whole database is a single SQLite file — a backup is copying that file, and the admin can schedule backups to S3 on its own.

Where it fits — and where it doesn’t

This is the leanest production setup for the everyday app: sites, CRUD apps, internal tools, dashboards, and MVPs — most of what teams actually build. It’s not for a Figma-class canvas or a write-heavy system that has to span regions on day one; SQLite takes one writer at a time and PocketBase runs on a single node, so you scale up on a bigger box, not out across many. For everything else, one binary is your database, your auth, your admin, and your frontend — and you can hold the whole system in your head at once.